A Picture Held Us Captive

by Danielle Dutton, Nicholas Muellner (Editor), Catherine Taylor (Editor)

A chapbook. Author Danielle Dutton's A Picture Held Us Captive asks what it means for a writer to work "with" someone or something else—to make art in dialogue with an energy not one's own. Dutton (born 1975) explores ekphrastic fiction, looking at a wide range of writers and artists including John Keene and Edgar Degas; Eley Williams and Bridget Riley; Ben Lerner and Anna Ostoya; Amina Cain and Bill Viola; Lydia Davis and Joseph Cornell; as well as her own textual responses to visual artists Richard Kraft and Laura Letinsky. A Picture Held Us Captive—which includes a series of images at once illustrative and refusing simple illustration—considers the ways in which ekphrasis operates as a diptych. A work of both commentary and self-reflection, Dutton considers a dialectic between art’s ability to make strange what has grown familiar and the writer’s desire to make recognizable the experience of one artwork in the space of another.

Genres: Art, Essays

50 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2022

About the author

Danielle Dutton's fiction has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, The Paris Review, The White Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, and NOON. She is the author of Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called "indescribably beautiful"; SPRAWL, a finalist for the Believer Book Award in 2011, reprinted by Wave Books with an Afterword by Renee Gladman in 2018; Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft; and the novel Margaret the First. In 2010, Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. Over the past decade, the press has published the work of Renee Gladman, Leonora Carrington, Cristina Rivera Garza, Barbara Comyns, Jen George, Amina Cain, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Nathalie Leger, and other innovative writers.

Reviews

[Nathália · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ekphrastic