VIRTUAL LACE COURSE

CHANGING CULTURES IN EUROPE

Module 4: Literature & Photography [Jan BAETENS]

• Taught by: K.U.Leuven (Belgium): Jan Baetens

• Selected Format: pre-recorded session
• Language: English

1. Theoretical Introduction

Literature and photography as an example of intermediality : a) each medium is networked to

other media, b) each medium is itself a network of media.

Roughly speaking, the "intermedial turn" in media studies (of which literary studies are just a
tiny sector), can be compared with the "intertextual turn" that took place in literary studies
three or four decades ago. The basic conviction of intertextuality/intermediality is that it is no
longer possible to focus on just one text/medium, but that each text/medium is not only linked
to other texts/media, but that these other texts/media are present and active within each
text/medium.
What makes things more complicated (besides of course the difficulty of defining what a
text/medium exactly is, but this is a different question), is the fact that
intertextuality/intermediality are often linked with the notion of interdisciplinarity.
What is actually the problem? On the one hand, it is now generally accepted that cultural
artefacts (in the case of this lesson: texts, photographs, but also phototexts) are open to various
disciplinary approaches. On the other hand, it is no less known that even in collaborative
projects, most researchers share the same disciplinary background, methodology, aims, etc.
Interdisciplinarity is therefore often an illusion: literary scholars who discuss photography do not
always have the necessary competence and training in this field (and vice versa, of course), and
their insights may not be taken seriously by their colleagues belonging to the other field (often,
the distance between their competences and insights takes the form of anachronism: literary
scholars making statements on photography do not always follow photography's state of the
art, and vice versa).

Does this mean that it is not possible to tackle the relationships between literature and
photography? Not at all, on the contrary.

First of all, we simply don't have the choice: the two media of writing and photography are
undergoing a steadily growing process of hybridization.

Second, we should be modest. Interdisciplinarity is a complex phenomenon, and it does not

suffice to study intermedial phenomena to be interdisciplinary scholars (in this case, our
perspective remains literary, although it may shift to something else; the perspective is not that,

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for instance, of the narrative aspects of photography, either the single image or the sequence of
images, which reflects a partially different of view and which would ask for a different
methodology).

For all these reasons, it may be interesting to foreground the more modest, yet perhaps more
efficient notion of "transdisciplinarity", as defined by H. Nowotny and others:

'trans-disciplinarity’, by which is meant the mobilization of a range of theoretical

perspectives and practical methodologies to solve problems. But, unlike inter- or multi-
disciplinarity, it is not necessarily derived from pre-existing disciplines, nor does it
always contribute to the formation of new disciplines. The creative act lies just as much
in the capacity to mobilize and manage these perspectives and methodologies, their
‘external’ orchestration, as in the development of new theories or conceptualisations, or
the refinement of research methods, the ‘internal’ dynamics of scientific creativity.
(Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbson M. Introduction, ‘Mode 2’ Revisited: The New
Production of Knowledge, Minerva 41: 179–194, 2003)

It is in this cautious, yet open and creative perspective of transdisciplinarity, that we would like
to introduce some thoughts on literature and photography.

PS Please check also the ppt that accompanies this lesson for some (rough) illustrations.

2. The basic problem of studying literature and photography

The relationship between photography/literature is an interesting case, since at first sight

there are only few and superficial contacts (at least in comparison with a field such as literature
and cinema). Surveys of literary history, for instance, will hardly provide examples of texts
combined with photographs.

Yet this impression is debatable, and perhaps deceptive.

First of all, for historical and cultural reasons: many books and other publications that were
photographically illustrated, or that contained other examples of photographic material, have
been "de-visualized".

• "serious" literature has often been reprinted without images (example: Rodenbach,
Bruges-la-Morte, 1892; see illustrations ppt);
• Illustrations in serious literature were restricted to special editions, and the images were
dropped in non-bibliophilic trade editions (ex.: Léon-Paul Fargue, Banalité, 1930; see
illustrations ppt; for a description of the object, see:
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5433970)
• "commercial" or even "pulp" fiction, in which photographic illustrations were quite
common, have been "forgotten" by literary history, which only retains the "canon", and
are hardly available in libraries (university libraries have longtime neglected this type of
material, and in other libraries, only recent books and publications are on shelf). see in
ppt the illustrations of "En Bombe" by Willy

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 • much photographic material was considered "peritextual", and therefore "secondary"
(cover illustrations, portraits of the author, etc.) (see in the ppt the covers of
theanthology by Jane Rabb and the study by Paul Edwards)

It is only recently, and thanks to the efforts of committed historians, that this part of our literary
heritage starts again to be disclosed. Of course, it would be naive to deny that the decisive
factor in this rediscovery has been the "visual turn" in literature: since a couple of years,
photographic images are everywhere, and it is their present ubiquity that opens our eyes to
certain practices of the past. Yet there is still much work to be done.

Second, and more fundamentally, there has been the widespread conviction that literary was
not only a cultural practice deprived of images, but that within the visual field, photographic
images were even less present and valued than other images (such as engravings, mainly). Here
as well, there have been many explanations, but all of them are a mix of technological and
cultural aspects:

• technically speaking, one had to wait till the industrial use of the duo tone technique (in
the 1880s) before it became possible to print simultaneously texts and pictures (before,
all photographic images were printed separately and added manually to each individual
copy of the book) (see in ppt illustration cover book Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a
Library)
• till the end of the 19th century, it was a common practice to replace pictures by
engravings based on pictures, not only for financial reasons (for engravings could be
printed together with the text), but also because the audience considered these
engravings more appealing (they were more dramatic and more narrative) (see in the
ppt an example of a photo by A. Gardner versus an anonymous engraving of the Battle
of Antietam; more detailed readings in Sandweiss)
• once photographs could be printed, many authors were reluctant to combine
photographs and literature (for photography was "mechanical" whereas literature was
"creative") and even more to join photography (which was believed to be "real") and
fiction (this is also the reason why there is less tension between photography and
poetry than between photography and prose: in the case of poetry, the opposition
fiction versus non-fiction is not relevant, at least not today). Hence the often ingenious
solutions found by those who, like Henry James, did accept to collaborate with
photographers (in his case: Alvin Langdon Coburn). (see ppt illustrations of
Coburn/James and Man Ray/Paul Eluard, Facile, 1935)

Thirdly, there is also the intriguing observation that 19th Century literature, which had been
establishing a lively dialogue with all kinds of new inventions, media, and technologies,
remained almost silent on photography. Thanks to the research of Philippe Ortel it has now
become possible to correct that simplified and superficial view of literary history. In his seminal
book La littérature à l'ère de la photographie, he claims that photography has indeed signified a
revolution, but an indirect or, excuse the paradox, an "invisible" one. Ortel's close-readings of
the literature of the 19th Century have demonstrated very convincingly that the influence of
photography on literature has been decisive, and that it has dramatically changed all aspects of
writing (see cover Ortel in the ppt).

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 • The process of writing itself: the author is seen as a camera recording the outside
world and developing its images within the dark room of his brain.
• The way one sees the world: this becomes a question of framing, pointing, selecting,
etc.
• The final interpretant (or "accepted interpretation") of what is being written: this
interpretant becomes more and more visual

Today, we are evolving towards a situation in which the relationship between literature and
photography is being turned upside down. As argued by François Brunet in his landmark book
Photography and Literature, it is now photography that has become the dominant medium. The
age-old hierarchy of the two practices has to be inverted, and literature is now more and more
becoming an aspect of photography. (see cover Brunet in ppt + review of Brunet's book by
Baetens in the preparatory/supplementary reading)

3. A functional approach of photography and literature

It does of course not suffice to bring together literature and photography. For each medium,
one has to make a distinction between the object and its uses.

If we take for instance poetry as the literary object we want to analyze, it is crucial to know what
ideas authors and readers (and of course also publishers, librarians, critics, teachers) share on
what poetry is supposed to be: a form of self-expression? a linguistic experiment? a form of
political action? a way of communicating? an anachronism that can only be parodied? etc.
According to what we know of the function of poetry, we will then have to evaluate the
intermedial presence/absence of specific forms of photographs.

The problem is more complex on the side of photography, where at first sight the uses of the
medium seem more reduced (photography is still mainly seen as a form of documenting reality,
which informs all its major functions: art/advertisement on the one hand, reportage/science on
the other hand. Yet the increased awareness of the constructed character of a picture as well as
the growing presence of staged (fictional) photography are blurring the boundaries between the
traditional functions of the medium. Neither of these evolutions is new, however, and it would
be naive to explain them by the rise of digital photography (whose impact on photography is
totally different: digitization has less changed what we picture, and how we do it, then that it
has revolutionized the circulation of images, which have become viral).

In the case of photography, it can be useful to stress the influence of the medium's technology,
which determines its uses (and not just its aesthetics). In another of his books, La Naissance de
l'idée de photographie, Brunet has argued that the three great types of 19th Century
photography (the French daguerreotype, the British calotype, the American Kodak) are not only
distinguished by formal and material features (sharpness vs lack of sharpness, reproducibility vs
non-reproducibility, direct positive image vs negative-positive image), but that they are deeply
rooted in cultural differences. A photographic technique or device, says Brunet, obeys in the
very first place a certain idea (and hence a certain use) of the medium: the daguerreotype exists
because of the scientific utopia of a perfect and transparent reproduction of the world; the
calotype (and the book culture it supported) cannot be disconnected from the private sphere of
amateur chemistry and magic of the English gentry; the Kodak revolution is one of the epitomes

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of the democratic ideal of mass industrial culture. (Students interested in this way of thinking,
may read with great interest Henri Van Lier's book Histoire photographique de la photographie,
the English translation of which is now available online:
http://henrivanlier.com/anthropogeny/al_semiotique_hpp_an.html).
(see cover book Brunet in ppt)

In addition, it is important as well to stress how the use of each photographic object is not only
determined by its maker, but also by its user, for the public has to integrate the picture (and of
course this may include the making of the picture as well) in what John Dewey calls an
"experience", which arises from the interaction of two principles -- continuity and interaction.
Continuity is that each experience a person has will influence his/her future, for better or for
worse. Interaction refers to the situational influence on one's experience. In other words, one's
present experience is a function of the interaction between one's past experiences and the
present situation. But of course, these speculations may divert our attention from...
photography and literature. (see cover book Dewey in ppt)

4. Some methodological suggestions

But how to analyze the word and image relationships in the case of photography and literature?

As already said (cf. transdisciplinarity), it is important, for clarity's sake, to define with great
precision the standpoint that one wants to adopt, and to examine the intermedial dialogue from
that specific perspective. The way literary scholars will look at literature and photography
cannot be the same as the way photography scholars will do so, and it may not be the best
solution to try to find a middle-of-the-road solution to vanquish their differences...
A good general basis for a literature-oriented research is offered by the PhD by Anne Reverseau,
Le rôle de la photographie dans l'esthétique moderniste (Paris III, 2011). She distinguishes five
major fields:

• writers using photography, be it as photographers or otherwise (f.i. as models), for

instance: Loti posing in disguise (as the characters of his novels, see illustration in ppt);
• writers evoking or describing pictures in their texts (in the classic tradition of
"ekphrasis") for instance Claude Simon using the family post card archive to write his
novel Histoire (see illustration in ppt)
• writers including images as material objects in their texts and/or paratexts (the best
known example being of course André Breton's Nadja) (see ppt for a typical double
spread of Nadja)
• writers transposing the aesthetics of photography in their own writing, for instance
Blaise Cendrars at the moment of writing his collection of poetry Kodak (official title
"Documentaire"), an example of collage poetry (the lines of this work are -hidden-
quotations of a popular novel of that time) (see in ppt: cover Cendrars)
• writers abandoning literature and shifting towards photography, for instance Denis
Roche who resigns "poetry" in order to continue writing with a camera (but who,
simultaneously, continues also to write...) (see in ppt: cover of a book on Roche)

Each of these fields or aspects can then be described in various steps, starting from a description
and ending with an interpretation.

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In the very elementary case of a picture reproduced in a book, one should ask questions such as:
- where is the picture inserted? is it part of text or paratext?
- what does it represent?
- is it described in the (para)text, and how?
- which size has it, and how is it positioned on the page?
- how many images do we find, and what is the rhythm of their occurrences?
- do we know the original, and are there notable differences?
- who is the photographer?
- is there an intertextual model for this kind of illustrations?
- etc.
And, obviously, behind each question should come the "why question" - to be answered
according to notions of "function" and "experience".

5. Case studies:

a) rapid overview of frequently studied objects:

• genre: the photonovel

• context: the photographic (self-)representation of the author (cf. special issue of
Interférences, No 2, 2009: http://www.interferenceslitteraires.be/nr2, + lesson by Fred
Truyenon convergence culture, with youtube example)
• paratext: cover illustrations

b) brief analysis of Sebald's Vertigo

The Success of G.W. Sebald's novels (of which Vertigo was the first) has been crucial in the
current vogue of the photographically illustrated novel or memoir. Yet Sebald's work is far from
being an isolated case: on the one hand it cashes in on the contemporary trend of autofiction
(and various autofictionalists, such as for instance Hervé Guibert) had been including
photographs in their works since the early 80s; on the other hand, it operates a creative return
to the classics of the genre, and in the first place to Nadja by André Breton (1928). (see
illustrations in ppt: cover Vertigo + cover and double spread Guibert's Suzanne and Louise)

Nadja, as we know, uses photographs in order to obey a double "idea": photographs help
replace "boring" descriptions (and these descriptions are typical of the most hated genre of the
novel); photographs help guarantee the scientific claims of this Surrealist memoir, which aims at
being a real document, instead of being a work of fiction. (The extent to which this program has
been executed successfully is not at stake here: what matters is the fact that Nadja has become
the explicit or implicit model for all those who want to "do things" with words and images in
autobiographical or semi-autobiographical writings).

At first sight, Sebald seems to proceed in a much more cautious way than Breton: his book is not
seen as a war machine against the novel, and he does not dissimulate the subjective layers of his
writing. Hence the apparently more classic use of the pictures, which do not act as a substitute
for the descriptions and whose documentary (scientific) status is not unchallenged. Yet at the
same time, Sebald does more than Breton, while doing it also in a different way. He mixes
pictures and descriptions, but not in such a way that the text always refers with absolute

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certainty or fidelity to the image, nor vice versa. At the same time, it is not totally clear whether
the text is a novel (which apparently it seems to be), or an autobiography.

In this regard, it can be interesting to have a closer look at the first section of Vertigo, which
rewrites Stendhal's Vie de Henry Brulard, a partially fictionalized autobiography containing many
drawings by the author and whose descriptions, as we have learnt to know today, were heavily
influenced by the iconographic tradition of the events told. The famous scenes of Napoleon's
army crossing the Alps, admirably written by Stendhal/Beyle and no less excitingly rewritten by
Sebald, are less representations of the author's personal souvenirs (who participated as a young
man in the "Campagne d'Italie", than descriptions of later paintings and engravings that
Stendhal had seen in museums and elsewhere.

See in ppt: images of Brulard and one of the images that inspired Stendhal

The fact that Sebald starts his novel (and the whole autofictional project that is to follow) with
the illustrated rewriting of Vie de Henry Brulard can therefore be read as a kind of anticipative
"mise en abyme" (or, if one prefers a musicological metaphor, with the opening of an ouverture
that contains already all the motifs of the work to come):

• The use of Stendhal, as a prominent example of "fictional autobiography" sketches a

literary program that aims at questioning the thin line between authentic and fictional
(but of course, in literature fictional is not the opposite of truth).
• The use of drawings, i.e. of possibly and partially fictional elements (and not of reality-
based photographs) in this section suggests that the "documentary" value of the
photographs in subsequent sections may be open to discussion.
• The specific ways in which texts and images are combined foregrounds the technical and
stylistic innovation that Sebald will attempt to achieve (his page lay-out is totally
different from what we find in Breton's work).

6. Exercise

Personal reading of a Sebald chapter. Please use the complementary reading as well as the
bibliography (3 pages).

7. Preparatory/Complementary reading

Jan Baetens (2005), « The logic of extraction », History of Photography 29-1, 81-90
Jan Baetens (2007) , “Conceptual limitations of our reflection on photography: the question of
“interdisciplinarity”, in James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory, New York/London & Cork:
Routledge & Cork University Press, 53-73
Jan Baetens (2010), review of François Brunet, Photography and Literature, London: Reaktion
Books, 2009, in History of Photography 34: 3, 320-321

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8. (Very Selective) Bibliography

(only secondary bibliography)

Carol Armstrong (1999). Scenes in a Library. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

François Brunet (2000). La naissance de l'idée de photographie. Paris: PUF.
François Brunet (2009). Photography and Literature, London: Reaktion Books.
Paul Edwards (2008). Soleil noir. Photographie et littérature des origines au surréalisme. Rennes:
PU Rennes.
Danièle Méaux (éd.), Photographie et romanesque. Caen: Minard Lettres Modernes
Philippe Ortel (2002). La littérature a l'ère de la photographie. Enquête sur une révolution
invisible. Nîmes: J. Chambon.
Jane M. Rabb (1995). Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840-1990 : A Critical Anthology.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexcio Press.
Anne Reverseau (2011). Le rôle de la photographie dans l'esthétique moderniste (Unpublished
PhD, Paris III).
Martha A. Sandweiss (2002). Print the Legend. Photography and the American West. New
Haven: Yale UP.