Caroline Blinder

Goldsmiths, University of London, English and Creative Writing - School of Humanities, Faculty Member

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My research specialism lies in photography, in particular 20th and 21st century documentary photography, and in the intersections between politics and aesthetics in documentary practice more widely. As Reader in American Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing department at Goldsmiths University, London, I have taught literature, cinema, photography, and visual arts on the American culture pathway for undergraduate and graduate students since 2003. During that period, I have also published several monographs and submitted well over 30 articles, reviews, and chapters through peer review and by invitation. While many of my publications deal with image text relations, I have increasingly focused on the intersections between documentary photography and art history more widely, ranging from the use of the picturesque in contemporary environmental landscape photography to still life conventions in photographs from the Depression era.
I am currently working on a special volume for the Journal - History of Photography, a collection of critical essays on the photographer Robert Frank that examines his work across decades and mediums.
As a measure of my reputation within this field, I was awarded The Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at The Centre of Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at The National Gallery, Washington D.C. (Spring 2022) and prior to that I was the first Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of Art History in Japan at Doshisha and Kobe University (2019-2020).
For over 20 years, I have also taught American literature - convening and designing modules ranging from Science Fiction, Hollywood Cinema and Modernism, American Crime Writing and lectured across a wide range of 19th, 20th and 21st century writing for both undergraduates and postgraduates.
Supervisors: My PhD on Ideology and Aesthetics in the writings of Henry Miller was supervised by Prof. Clive Bush at King's College and London

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University of Toronto

Shaun Gallagher

University of Memphis

Noe Cornago

University of the Basque Country, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

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United Arab Emirates University

Niccolò Scaffai

University of Siena / Università di Siena

Julia Faisst

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Papers by Caroline Blinder

The Transparent Eyeball: On Emerson and Walker Evans

Mosaic (Winnipeg), Dec 1, 2004

Taking Emerson's "Nature" as its starting point, this paper argues that in Lincoln ... more Taking Emerson's "Nature" as its starting point, this paper argues that in Lincoln Kirstein's and William Carlos Williams's readings of Evans as a visionary artist of the vernacular, Emersonian ideals were always part and parcel of the search for an intrinsically American manifesto of photography. ********** Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. --Emerson, "Nature" This investigation takes as its starting point two distinct pieces of critical writing that emanated in response to Walker Evans's rise to fame in the 1930s: Lincoln Kirstein's "Photographs of America: Walker Evans" and William Carlos Williams's "Sermon with a Camera." Responding in particular to the publication of American Photographs, the catalogue for the 1938 Evans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, these writings not only reflected but partially embraced Emersonian idealism as a way to codify the aesthetic qualities of Evans's camera. In the process, this essay argues, they constructed a vision of American documentary photography as a native and transcendental art. In writing on American Photographs, Kirstein and Williams used an Emersonian rhetoric to connect the everyday, the vernacular, with a spiritualized and transcendent idea of vision, a vision in which the transcendental operated as a useful metaphor for the link between the aesthetic potential of the camera and its mechanical use. For Kirstein and Williams, American Photographs proved, once and for all, that photography, even within the remit of documentary photography, did not constitute merely a dispassionate representation of "real" lives and people. Instead it promised an active, living way to articulate the importance of the vernacular as intrinsic to the modernist project. The representation of the vernacular, under siege one could argue in the 1930s, thus lent itself to a discourse interested in the use-value of photography as a marker for America in both utopian and distopian terms. If Kirstein and Williams were looking for something that could prove the currency of an American vernacular under duress for economic and political reasons, photography seemed to be that thing. In creating images of vernacular life, Evans's camera--according to Kirstein and Williams--could be established as a visionary mechanism in its own right, a useful metaphor for the artist's relationship to his or her subject, to nature and landscape, and to an investigation into representation itself. This essay takes as its specific starting point Kirstein's assertion that Evans's images represent "much that is best in photography's past and in its American present" (192). The fact that Kirstein and Williams sought to spiritualize the photographic enterprise whilst being attuned to the tensions implicit in the era's political and cultural use of documentary photography, is a matter I have to take into account. Hence the essay shows how Evans, although representative of a particular modernist effort, was also seen as a visionary in a transcendentalist sense, as an artist whose Emersonian aesthetics sought to combine personal vision with national specificity. The issue for both Kirstein and Williams was not only to provide an entry into a definition of the vernacular capable of incorporating the houses, the objects, and faces of the people photographed on a wider metaphorical level, but also the mass of social and philosophical contradictions that make up the documentary project. As one of the first documentary photographers to be canonized by the art establishment, Evans's success was aided in this respect by Kirstein's and Williams's canny use of an Emersonian rhetoric to connect the vernacular with a transcendent idea of vision. …

‘Between the Unimagined and the Imagined: Photographic Aesthetics and Literary Illumination in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’

Brill | Rodopi eBooks, 1999

... a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a me... more ... a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase in the mind itself. Thus Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Stephen Hero: defines the phenomenon that has ever since been known as the literary epiphany. The essays gathered in this volume comprise a wide survey of this phenomenon. With recurrent reference to its most famous creators, notably William Wordsworth, who was the first to consciously explore and delineate those momentous spots in time in his Prelude, Walter Pater, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, this book intends to provide a broad and unbiased exploration into the various types and categories of the moment of moment that can be distinguished, ranging from William Blake, Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin through the nineteenth-century sonnet tradition and the naturalistic novel to modernist and postmodernist exponents such as Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bowen, Philip larkin and Seamus Heaney, and include contributions by acclaimed experts in the field such as Martin Bidney, Robert Langbaum, Jay Losey, and Ashton Nichols.

New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2010

Caroline Blinder

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