SOURCE: “‘The True Witness of a False Event’: Photography and Wright Morris's Fiction of the 1950s,” in Western American Literature, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 27-57.

In the following essay, Barrett examines the vicissitudes of photographic reality according to Morris, and how Morris uses photography to influence our understanding of the actual world.

The photographer's power lies in his ability to re-create his subject in terms of its basic reality, and present this re-creation in such a form that the spectator feels that he is seeing not just a symbol for the object, but the thing itself revealed for the first time. Guided by the photographer's selective understanding, the penetrating power of the camera-eye can be used to produce a heightened sense of reality—a kind of super realism that reveals the vital essences of things.

—Edward Weston, “What Is Photographic Beauty?”

In 1939, photographer Edward Weston envisioned a...