Editorial: Special Issue on Photography and Literature

Photography's active relationship to the word, to writing, and to literature is widely recognized as being as old as photography itself. As recent scholarship shows, in Niepce's earnest search for a name for the technique he had invented or in Fox Talbot's puzzling over the first images that his technique produced, the enigmatic nature of the photograph was immediately engaged by thought and language (Batchen).

Following the convergence of the chemical photograph and the printing press, the photograph became ever more intimate with the printed word and its cultural forms: the book, the document, the newspaper, the diary. With their varied purposes, the advertising copywriter, the journalist, the lawyer, the archivist, the compiler of the domestic album, not to mention the surrealist or the conceptual artist, came to grapple and play with the relationship of image and text.

In the West, the relationship of the photograph and literature can be seen as a modern phase of a much longer history. A history that would include, for instance, the classical literary genre of ekphrasis, a branch of rhetoric dedicated to the special problems of writing about pictures and visual experience, or Alberti's advice, in De Pittura, urging painters to conceive of their images as “istoria”; spatial compositions in which surfaces, members, and bodies were to be organized as if analogous to the phrases, sentences, and passages of literary narratives.

The relationships of photographic images to texts and language are ongoing and changing. In our current context, new vernacular forms such as the (photo)blog emerge, the image is produced, distributed, and exchanged with a speed and immediacy so as to be likened to a kind of speech (Rubinstein and Sluis). The digital or digitized photograph has become the semantic unit of the web, working in interactive ways with text, the written and the spoken word, the font, and other graphic and animated elements. The digital image is born with metadata, it carries its own linguistic supplement which facilitates connections, ensembles, and classifications across universes of images. In its first three volumes Photographies has dealt with some of these developments and intends to do so again in future issues.

This issue departs from the “flickering signifier” of the digital image (Hayles 30), the image refreshed many times per second on the computer screen, and the fragile informational patterns in which form the networked photographic image is encoded, distributed, and displayed. This issue takes ‘Photography and Literature’ as its theme and the photographs considered by the contributors mainly belong to what has recently been conceived as an “analogue” era. The literary texts that they think about are novels and stories. They deal with forms of inscription: the physically and chemically inscribed photograph and the printed artefact, bound books of the 19th and 20th centuries produced by the thud and impress of the typewriter key and the printer's plate. These are more than technical differences in any narrow sense. In much the same way that the “still” photograph was “invented” by cinema — before which, surely, all images were still (Campany) and therefore not meaningfully classified as such — the application of digital technology to photography over the last two decades (and to much else, including the production and distribution of text) has thrown into sharp relief the analogue nature of earlier production. As one contributor (Newman) notes, the modality of the late 19th century photographs which he writes about, thought of as “mirrors” and “relics”, are now for us “a thing of the past”. Maybe. Yet there is no homogenous present; the present that concerns us here being that of photographic and literary practices. The present is not a discrete and bounded moment in a linear and progressive temporality. Modalities jostle, practices coexist, relations are recursive, and even the new has a history.

The articles in this issue explore the work that images do within literary texts, particularly novels. They also reflect upon the differences and the affinities between texts and images, and the two way traffic between photographic and literary inscriptions, depictions, and representations. In the idea of literary images, literary description is seen to be informed by photographic seeing, while, conversely, certain kinds of photography owe much to literary description and authorship. How this might be changing this side of the digital/analogue divide cannot be directly tackled here. However, for certain, we will not begin to know this without the kind of research and reflection that takes place in these pages.

All the contributions included in this issue of Photographies represent work undertaken within the Image and Language research hub at the Royal College of Art, London. Whether still, moving, or written, the image here embraces practices of representation within photography, film, and visual arts in general. Particular attention is put upon studies and practices that work upon the relation between photography and writing as forms of inscription. Here research aims to develop new forms of writing on the image as well as new ways of relating theory and criticism to practice. This RCA research hub also aims to create working links with researchers from other art school and universities, nationally and internationally.

The contributions

The present collection of essays proposes various readings of photographic images in relation to literary texts. Literary photographs could be an alternative, more specific title. However, image is more inclusive in this context, as it denotes a linguistic as well as a visual representation. The relation between image and language is here taken in a broad sense. The literary texts, with Kafka (Caygill) or Tournier (Lomax) include textual photographs in their stories, as descriptions or elements of a plot. In the case of Rodenbach (Newman) and Seabald (Pacteau), the actual presence of the photograph alongside the text produces specific and yet intuitive correspondences between word and image. With Marguerite Duras (Whitehall), it is the filmic, a moving image characterized by its slowness, and its relation to a narrative voice that creates a gap and a difference between what is said and what is seen. Lewis Carroll's Alice is a reference text that produces Alicious objects (Mavor), six impossible descriptions of photographic images. Petersen's “An Unknown Route” is informed by the Denkbild (image thought), a term from Adorno. It is a collection of short narratives reminiscent of Michel Leiris’ subtle fragments of subjectivity, as in his novel Manhood. The photograph of a modernist bedroom by Walker Evans (Richon) enables us to link Gustave Flaubert's art of describing with Evans’ form of photography.

What these essays have in common is an interest in a critical and analytical voice that is mixed with the explicit pleasure of reading. Here the practise of reading an image or a text demands a certain attention and an articulation in language. The pleasure of reading is also a pleasure in research. It seeks correspondences, gets close to the image or the text, and isolates details that lead to others. It relies on a certain technique close to that of montage or collage. What comes out of many contributions is an attention to temporality within the textual and the photographic.

Francette Pacteau's close reading of Sebald's story, Dr Henry Selwyn, pays particular attention to the use of the past and the present tense of verbs in the narrative, and how this affects the time of the photographic images that accompany the writing of Sebald. Text and photograph foreground a link between collecting and taking. We take photographs, as if the verb itself demonstrates the acquisitive and almost tactile tendency of the photographic act. We also take time to read a text or a photograph, an activity that demands a form of attention predicated upon slowness.

Michael Newman also discusses the question of time in Rodenbach's novel Bruges la Morte. This novel is accompanied by topographical photographs of Bruges that act, according to the author, like a character in a novel. Newman links the sense of intemporality that he finds in the photographs to a dead time, characterized by pertification, which is associated with melancholia and the cult of relics that affects the sad hero of the novel. There is also a connection between literature, photography, and cinema here, as the plot of the novel recalls that of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Doubles, substitutes, as well as hair as relic add to the photographic quality and stillness of the story.

Carol Mavor follows the example of Lewis Carroll's character, the White Queen, who only remembers ‘things that happened the week after next’. She proposes a paradoxical reading of the photograph as a sign that refers positively to the future of ageing. The text refutes the common idea of photography as a nostalgic attempt to preserve the past and the beauty of youth. What is advocated is a reading of images and texts in relation to the future, reading nostrologically (nostrology is another word for gerontology). Her case studies range from Sally Mann's photographs to those of the houses cut in half of Gordon Matta Clark. A sceptre with a dodo at its end also stands as an emblematic nostrological object.

Jonathan Whitehall's text centres on the articulation between stillness, slowness and the inscription of a narrative voice in Marguerite Duras’ film trilogy of Aurelia Steiner. The work first existed as literature before being turned into a film. Writing, filming, writing again are here ways of articulating the affective dimension of the memory of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. It confronts the event that in the West has comes to signify the limit of language and representation, when words and images fail.

Yve Lomax links Michel Tournier's novel The Golden Droplet to Giorgio Agamben's thoughts on the term species. In The Golden Droplet, the narrator is perplexed by the possessive pronoun my when it is attached to the word photograph. Is my photograph a picture that I own, or is it a picture that represents me? Is it an image, is it a portrait? Is this a question of classification? Agamben shows that the term species relates to classification, archiving, and identity. Yet his genealogy of the term excavates an earlier Latin version that equates species with appearance, vision, image. Lomax expands on this by linking the photograph to a particular type of species. The image shows itself as image, it communicates itself, as the meaning it carries with it is itself. The photograph therefore hovers, as in Tournier's novel, between classification and visibility as such.

Howard Caygill develops a close reading of signifiers of loss in Kafka's novel America and follows the traces of a lost photograph through the dense prose of the author. This irrevocable loss and its impossible replacement is retold in a form that emphasizes the complicated sense of narrative time, making the reader aware of the specificity of Kafka's writing. We can also remember that in The Metamorphosis a photograph is the only picture on the walls of Gregor Samsa's bedroom. It is an image from an illustrated magazine that Gregor has placed in a gilt frame. It shows a woman wearing furs, holding a huge fur muff. After his metamorphosis, Gregor will cling to the cold glass of the frame, soothing his warm belly against its surface and concealing the image entirely with his insectile body. He clings to it as one clings to a memory.

Regine Petersen has written subjective fragments that read like images and visual narratives. She has expanded her photographic practice to include writing. Yet both practices are predicated upon associations of thoughts, memories, dream images. The work is primarily intuitive, yet it has a debt towards the specific practice of the fragment that begins with Novalis and Romanticism, and that is later reconsidered by Benjamin, with his dialectical images as well as Adorno's Denkbilder, or image-thoughts. The Denkbild, for Adorno, “criticises society by merely existing”. It is a picture puzzle, mixing linguistic and visual elements that resist closure and instrumentality.

Olivier Richon considers an unexpected photograph of a modernist bedroom taken by Walker Evans in 1932 that sits uncomfortably within the photographer's corpus. It proposes a reading of the image that relates to Evans’ self proclaimed debt to literature, in particular Gustave Flaubert. The form of enunciation that characterizes the writer's descriptions becomes a template for the photographic depictions particular to Evans’ practice. Themes include visual tropes such as copying and mise en abyme that contribute to a certain rhetoric of indifference. Biographical references are here used as a way to bring certain details to the fore. They are used as fragments, biographemes, as Barthes would put it, that bring a narrative emphasis to the proposed reading of the photographs.