16 Fall/Winter 2010

WRITING IN

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 17

The Huntington is home to the

largest archive of Jack London

materials in the world, spanning

some 50,000 items and following

the great California writer from

Alaska to Hawaii to Asia and

beyond. London may be known

best for his iconic novel, The Call

of the Wild, but, in fact, he had a

colorful stint as a photojournalist,

chronicling current events at the

turn of the 20th century. A new

book examines London’s eye for

adventure and reproduces, for the

first time, his remarkable photo-

graphs of key moments in history.

It showcases photos from The

Huntington and the California State

Parks, Jack London State Historic

Park Collection.

L IGHT THE PHOTOGRAPHY

OF JACK LONDON

By Jeanne Campbell Reesman and Sara S. Hodson

18 Fall/Winter 2010

hen new war correspon-dent Jack London arrived in Moji,Japan, to cover the Russo-JapaneseWar for the Hearst newspapers, hewas arrested by military police. TheJapanese authorities suspected Londonof being a Russian spy. But, as he relatesin one of his earliest newspaper dis-patches in February 1904, “How JackLondon Got in and out of Jail inJapan,” a Japanese journalist succeededin securing the return of his camera.London recalls his meeting with areporter for the Osaka Asahi Shimbun:“I could have thrown my arms aroundhim then and there—not for the cam-era, but for brotherhood, as he himselfexpressed it the next moment, becausewe were brothers in craft. Then wehad tea together and talked over theprospects of war.”

London (1876–1916) went on tocover the war in Korea as one of thefirst and only correspondents to reachthe front lines, though he was repeat-edly arrested and returned to Seoul.(The land battles of the war were foughtmainly in Korea and Manchuria.) Hesent regular dispatches on battleslargely unseen by anyone but the par-ticipants, and he made dramatic pho-tographs, mostly behind the lines. Theseimages and accounts, along with his fewactual battle photographs, ran across thefront pages of the San Francisco Examinerand in syndicated papers worldwide.London’s hundreds of photographscapturing military scenes and the dailylives of Korean refugees and Japanesefoot soldiers form an extraordinaryrecord of what he called the “humandocuments” of the war. This period

of his development as a photographercoincided with his first worldwideacclaim as a writer, especially for hisnovels The Call of the Wild (1903) andThe Sea-Wolf (1904).

The term photographie, coined byFrench explorer Hércules Florence,means “writing in light.” As a writerwho was also a practicing photogra-pher, London was not unique, thoughfew so excelled in both roles. Artistscontemporary with London who wereinterested in both photography andliterature included the writers HenryJames, William Dean Howells, andStephen Crane as well as the photog-raphers Edward Steichen, Walker Evans,and Alfred Stieglitz.

Of course, London was not prima-rily a photographer who had adventuresbut rather an adventurer and writer who

W

made photographs. Yet he thought ofhimself as a professional: he expected tosell his photographic output just as hedid his writing. The subject matter—the English poor, Korean refugees,Japanese soldiers, tent cities in the after-math of the 1906 San Francisco earth-quake, prisoners of war in Veracruz, a

sailing crew rounding the Horn, field-workers in Hawaii, and the disappear-ing societies of the Marquesas and otherSouth Seas islands—also makes his pho-tographs of value to military historians,cultural geographers, and anthropologists.

The sense of realism—“writing inlight”—that pervades London’s fictionalso informs his photography. His writ-ings have been described as both real-istic and romantic, but most often theyare termed naturalistic. Influenced bythe ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud,and Charles Darwin, and using thetechniques of the French novelist Émile

Zola, American naturalistic writers suchas London, Stephen Crane, FrankNorris, and Theodore Dreiser depict-ed the lives of the poor as strugglesagainst the pitiless and illimitableforces of biology and society. Thoughmany of their protagonists are heroic,they are not usually able to overcomethe forces arrayed against them. Thesewriters employed a documentary, pho-tographic use of detail that contrastedstrongly with the leisurely accumula-tion of details in realist novels.

In his photographs as in his fiction,London most often sought to capturethe common emotional life of hissubjects. Even in his photographs ofthe many buildings destroyed by theSan Francisco earthquake, his compo-sitions evoke the human toll of thecataclysm, sometimes by contrastingthe size of human subjects with themassive ruins around them. Londonsought to depict the potential forhuman drama. He was drawn to anysubject—even a ruined city hall thatwould later be rebuilt—that indicatedsomething of the struggle to survive. �

Jeanne Campbell Reesman and Sara S.Hodson, together with Philip Adam, are theco-authors of Jack London, Photographer,published by the University of Georgia Press.This article has been adapted from the book,with permission of the publisher. Reesmanis the Ashbel Smith Professor of English atthe University of Texas at San Antonio;Hodson is the curator of literary manuscriptsat The Huntington.

This period of his developmentas a photographer coincidedwith his first worldwide acclaim asa writer.

Opposite: London had his camera confiscated in Japan and was often detained by Japanese officials when he got too close to the front lines, especially as the warspread to the Yalu River, the boundary between Korea and Manchuria. Korea, 1904. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Page 16: Wearyand hungry men line up outside the entrance to Salvation Army shelter, London, 1902. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Above: Whilehis dispatches were published on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner and syndicated in other newspapers, London also became the subject of interestin his own right. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Below: Assessing the damage, San Francisco, 1906. California State Parks Collection.

“Small Doss House.” A lodging house, London, 1902. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

“And I thought of my own spacious West, with room under its sky and unlimited air for a thousand Londons; andhere was this man, a steady and reliable man, never missing a night’s work, frugal and honest, lodging in one roomwith two other men, paying two dollars and a half per month for it, and out of his experience adjudging it to bethe best he could do! And here was I, on the strength of the ten shillings in my pocket, able to enter in with myrags and take up my bed with him. The human soul is a lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes whenthere are three beds to a room, and casuals with ten shillings are admitted.”

From The People of the Abyss

20 Fall/Winter 2010

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 21

“Feng Wang Chen,” Korea, 1904. California State Parks.

“At 10 o’clock the Japanese battery on the right fired the firstgun. Following the report was a sound as of the violent rippingof a vast sheet of cloth, as the shell tore through the atmos-phere and sighed away in the distance. Two miles away, acrossthe river and to the right of Tiger Hill, there was a bright flash,a puff of smoke and a dust-cloud rose where the flyingshrapnel tore the earth.”

From “Give Battle to Retard Enemy,” Antung [Manchuria], inJack London Reports

22 Fall/Winter 2010

City Hall ruins from City HallAvenue near Larkin Street, SanFrancisco, 1906. The rails and tiesin the foreground were placed ontop of the pavement for debrisremoval. California State Parks.

“An hour later I was creepingpast the shattered dome of theCity Hall. Than it there was nobetter exhibit of the destructiveforce of the earthquake. Mostof the stone had been shakenfrom the great dome, leavingstanding the naked frameworkof steel. Market Street was piledhigh with the wreckage, andacross the wreckage lay theoverthrown pillars of the CityHall shattered into short cross-wire sections.”

From “The Story of an Eye-Witness,” in Jack London Reports

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“Some of the King’s Household,” Samoa, 1908. California State Parks.

24 Fall/Winter 2010

The Dirigo’s sails and deck, 1912.California State Parks.

“Day had come, and the sunshould have been up an hour, yetthe best it could produce was asomber semi-twilight. The oceanwas a stately procession of movingmountains. A third of a mile acrossyawned the valleys between thegreat waves. Their long slopes,shielded somewhat from the fullfury of the wind, were broken bysystems of smaller whitecappingwaves, but from the high crestsof the big waves themselves thewind tore the whitecaps in theforming. This spume drove mast-head high, and higher, horizon-tally, above the surface of the sea.”

From “A Little Account withSwithin Hall”

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Three Constitutionialist officers, Veracruz, Mexico, 1914. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.