“My mind veers inflexibly toward the particular,” Joan Didion writes in her 1965 essay “On Morality.” When it comes to the concrete and specific, you might say there’s a continuum among her cohort (now mostly gone) of great American essayists. At one end, Susan Sontag’s epigrammatic judgments, with their relative lack of empirical texture. In the middle, Janet Malcolm’s fine attention to peculiarities of person or place. Then there is Didion, out along her own axis, where the essay is almost all detail. Sontag and Malcolm wrote extensively about photography. Didion, very little. But such is her mix of vision, exactitude, and atmospheric effect that her work seems more suited than that of others to sit alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, with an eye toward making connections. In their introduction to the catalog of Joan Didion: What She Means—a recent exhibition at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles—the show’s curators, Hilton Als and Connie Butler, speak of Didion’s “acutely visual language.” What does that mean?
Als, a friend and literary peer of Didion’s, has previously put together exhibitions about James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, authors whose power and presence we may imagine we glimpse in photographs of them. But Didion is something else: a writer whose talismanic image—in life, and even more so since her death, in December 2021—is the object of feverish projection and surmise. No wonder, when we survey celebrated portraits of her. In 1996, she sat for Irving Penn, who seems to have noticed that in many photographs of Didion it’s her thin, bare arms that do the work of conveying brittle thought processes. Brigitte Lacombe photographed her in the same year as Penn: here, Didion vanishes into her turtleneck sweater but remains unmistakable thanks to hands and hair. A photographic ideal of the writer was already present in Julian Wasser’s 1968 studies of Didion leaning against her new Corvette Stingray. The ideal was still there in 2014 when Juergen Teller photographed her for a Céline advertising campaign: sunglasses, helmet of silver hair, birdlike (always this adjective) limbs inside simple clinging black.
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