Emily Dickinson, Photography, and the Poetics of Extinction

Nurmi, “Emily Dickinson, Photography.” Photographs of fossils, endangered animals, and “vanishing races” of indigenous peoples confront viewers with a paradox. On the one hand, these photographs are visual evidence of... [ view full abstract ]

Nurmi, “Emily Dickinson, Photography.” Photographs of fossils, endangered animals, and “vanishing races” of indigenous peoples confront viewers with a paradox. On the one hand, these photographs are visual evidence of past and “present” extinctions, whether the stone-outline of an ancient plant or the fugitive animal on the verge of disappearance. On the other hand, the very medium of photography changes our definitions of preservation, the nature of memory, the colonial-visual project, and the relation of the human to other species across geologic time. To trace the origin of these changes in the nineteenth century, this paper first considers how extinction discourses dovetail with the early decades of American photography. In this context, “extinction” refers to the chemical process of “slaking” that produced chemicals like chloride of lime: a key component in quick, the chemical accelerator used in daguerreotypy. To put it differently, chemical extinction generates the compounds that capture species extinction; the archive is made visible through mineral-technologies whose byproducts threaten other forms of extinction. Following this materialist line of inquiry, the paper turns to mid-century writers – Emily Dickinson in particular – whose work explicitly links the processes of extinction and photography to make broader claims about how material practices of memory-making shape the contours of both literature and science in the age of mechanical reproduction.