Photo-texts
Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
In today’s image-saturated society, photograph and text live side-by-side, engaged in a complex collaboration. Andy Stafford critically examines this interplay in Photo-texts, taking nine case studies from the 1990s French-speaking world and looking at the interaction between non-fictional written texts (caption, essay, fragment, poem) and photographic images. The “photo-text,” as he defines it, is concerned as much with the oral as it is with visual and written culture. That text-image collaborations give space to the spoken, spectral traces of spoken human discourse suggests that the key element of the photo-text is its radical provisionality—that it is inherently unstable and ever-changing. This pathbreaking study offers a vital resource for scholars in contemporary French and francophone cultures.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 Image-text: From the 'Photobook' to 'Photo-essayism'
2 Found Family Photos: Voicing in Anne-Marie Garat's Essayism
3 My Favourite Piccies: Sequencing, Structuring and Essayism in Photo-Anthologies by Régis
Debray and Denis Roche
4 Distance and Self in Raymond Depardon's Errance
5 Regards croisés: The Moroccan City by Tahar Ben Jelloun
6 Fabulation in Fragments: Leïla Sebbar's Algeria through the Photography of Marc Garanger
7 Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi in the Penal Colony: Photo-text and
Memory-traces
8 'Paradis sans espoir'? Philippe Tagli's 'Photo-graffiti' in the Parisian Banlieue
9 'La légende de l'histoire': Bernard Noël's Captions for Photography of the Paris Commune
Conclusion: Silence, Orality, History
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Art: Photography
Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages
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