ABSTRACT

This chapter considers cross-currents between Mina Loy as the subject of the camera and the forms of photographic vision emerging in her work. Photographic portraits of Loy historicize her links to modern photography and the range of aesthetics familiar to her, illuminating gender dynamics attending modern and avant-garde photography. It focuses on the ways in which concepts of vision and perception surface across a wide range of Loy's poetry, proposing how this broadly evident interest motivates a modern orientation toward technologies, practices, and the cultural impact of photographic vision throughout the modernist poetics of Loy. The importance of visual modernity to Loy's work heightens her poetry's keen attention to visual apprehension and forms, from an interest in graphic presentations of the word, line, or page to explorations of cultural contexts, functions, media, and processes that infuse and shape modern life.