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• 1 media/ElizabethBishopPostcardsCase 8.jpg 2023-09-21T21:11:29+00:00 The Camera’s Eye: Postcards, Photography, Film 4 plain 2023-12-13T16:08:54+00:00 Bishop's postcards reveal her avid interest in photography and film. In a 1935 postcard of Pointe du Raz, Bishop wrote: “Here the eye of the camera has caught that particular swollen effect of the water around the rocks—but has omitted the lovely French sight-seers who swarmed before us and after us all the way around—Shall I ever escape the odor of urine in all natural scenery?” Bishop admired the texture of the image which she equated with the camera’s accurate mechanical “eye,” even as she humorously supplied the human elements omitted—tourists and the stench of urine. Bishop's late 1970s postcards to James Merrill depicting Edward Muybridge’s motion studies of a “goat walking” and “camel galloping” demonstrate her self-conscious attention to the postcard as a literal form of “moving image” connected to photography and film. Bishop details her own travels in the margins of the “camel galloping” image, implying that she, like the camel, is an animal whose rapid motion has been briefly arrested on and by the postcard, a snapshot in an ongoing journey. 
  
  These postcards take us beyond the touristic “picturesque” (Schlick) into the heart of Bishop's poetics. Reflecting on the mobile, occasional nature of her work, Bishop wrote, “I find it much easier to work away from home than ‘at home’ for some reason. In fact, when I think about it, it seems to me I’ve rarely written anything of value at the desk or in the room where I was supposed to be doing it—it’s always in someone else's house, or in a bar, or standing up in the kitchen in the middle of the night.” She often apologized for sending a postcard rather than a letter, writing with grudging acceptance on the camel card, “Letter-writing seems to be my lost art—well, and so is poetry-writing, I'm afraid, or almost.” That these well-known reflections are typed on Muybridge motion-study postcards is an important but neglected fact: if letter writing was Bishop’s “lost art,” postcard writing was her found art—the postcard’s compact, occasional, verbal-visual form perfectly suited Bishop's casual, “work away from home” aesthetic. 
  
  Like documentary photographer Walker Evans (Heuer 158-159), Bishop often reshot postcard “views,” and took great pains to artfully frame such photos. In a 1966 postcard depicting a close-up view of the Aleijadinho statue, “Amos,” from Bom Jesus de Matosinhos Church in Ouro Preto, Bishop mentions that “I have now taken color slides of all the prophets,” adding, “Yes, we have gone for that bourgeois sport.” In one of her color slides from this church, Bishop carefully frames the baroque statue Ezekiel next to a stairway to emphasize his arrested motion. In the memoir, “Trip to Vigia,” she recounted her efforts to photograph a baroque church from a particular angle: “I climbed on a stone wall, the remains of another abandoned house, to get a photograph of the whole thing, if possible, but there was nothing high enough to take it all in. It started to rain. I got a picture, jumped down—a dozen people had gathered to watch me, all looking scandalized—tripped, and tore my petticoat, which fell down below my skirt. The rain poured” (Pr 114-115). Bishop clearly thought her photos superior to postcard views, commenting in a 1960 postcard to her Aunt Florence, “This is a very bad picture of the market in Belem [...] I took some much better pictures myself, eventually I'll send some” (VC 98.6). 
  
  Bishop’s interest in cinema and photography emerged alongside and in relation to her use of picture postcards: the virtual erasure of these media forms from Bishop scholarship suggests the need to integrate her work into the history of modernism and mass media. One could certainly compare her practices to those of other modernists for whom the picture postcard and its media ecology proved central, including Evans, James Joyce, and Paul Éluard (Brockman, Heuer). Her postcards at Vassar include nineteenth-century photos of New York, a Berenice Abbott photo of the El Station, and a number of “real photograph” cards (Willoughby 67-73), including a photocard of a Brazilian steamboat she traveled on and an archival photo of a church in Diamantina (later published in The Diary of “Helena Morley”). Bishop sent Lowell postcard film stills of Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton (WIA 97, 205), and her postcards often mention films she had seen or planned to see, including films by Buster Keaton, Jean Cocteau, George Kukor, Yasujirō Ozu, Ingmar Bergman, Arther Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Claude Jutra, Woody Allen, and Peter Bogdanovich (3).
  
  3. In a recent essay, JT Welsch analyzes “The Moose” as “a movie.” He is neither the first nor likely to be the last critic to describe Bishop’s work as “cinematic” (198).