This lecture takes as its starting point Régis Durand’s evocative description of photographs as “images in crisis,” in which “something in them is always trying to run off, to vanish.” It moves through nineteenth and twentieth century photography history in establishing photography as a sequential and grammatical art that denaturalizes the real through its silences, absences, and equivocations. In this way, photography offers a compelling model for reading a composite mode of modernist writing that shares its fragmentary aesthetic and narrative form—and for reconceiving the gendered subject–object relations in that writing, as modernism’s women seem to run off, to vanish, before our eyes. Interleaved with critical–creative readings of individual photographs, drawn from a forthcoming scholarly project to be released on Instagram in February 2018, this lecture is an experiment in an elliptical, associative mode of argumentation that mimes photography’s logic of incongruous juxtaposition.