Dorothy Richardson : Online Exhibition

Dorothy Richardson was friends with many other modernist writers. This sequence of letters tells the story of the foundation of Close Up magazine, a journal that described itself as the first to celebrate ‘film as art’.

It was founded by Richardson’s good friend Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who was a writer and a poet, her partner H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), also a poet, and Kenneth MacPherson, an artist and filmmaker. Bryher asked Richardson to contribute to the journal, because her name, as an avant-garde experimental writer, would indicate to Close Up’s potential readership the kind of artistic project that the film magazine was trying to be.

Richardson was at first reluctant, and instead suggested the names of other writers who might know more about film than she did.