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Issue 8. Mélanges/Miscellaneous

The Photo-Text - An International one-day Conference

1 st of April, School of Advanced Studies,
University of London

Author: Monica Turci
Published: May 2004

Conference review of The Photo-Text - An International one-day Conference.
1 st of April 2004, School of Advanced Studies, University of London

Less than one year after the publication of Phototextualities (2003), a volume including a selection of papers delivered during a conference held at Durham University, the "Photo-Text" conference represents another sign of the increasing engagement with issues of the relationship between the written text and the photographic image. However, unlike the Durham conference in which the photo-text was defined ontologically as being at the intersection of different art forms, ranging from films to photographic installations, from docu-fictions to fictional literature, the conference in London focused a particular kind of photo-text which is concerned with the interplay between literary texts and photography. The focus of the papers were various examples of such photo-texts and the writers which created them in a period spanning from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1920's and 1930's. These papers offered diverse lines of interpretation opening up varied and multifaceted comparative discourses and perspectives on the subject.

Lindsay Smith opened the day with a discussion on Lewis Carroll's photography exploring the connection between Carroll's stammering and his photographic practice. Her paper, was in one respect firmly grounded in her past interests on Victorian photography, literature and culture as reflected in her book The Politics of Focus (1998), but in another respect it also added a new approach to these issues, one which compared linguistic theories on stammering by Deleuze and Jacobson with discourses on photography by Benjamin in order to shed light on a neglect episode in Caroll's biography and, more importantly, to develop a link between photographic and verbal forms of representation and their ways of constructing meanings in time.

The first panel continued the exploration of the relation between photography and nineteenth century culture and literature with an emphasis on the development of different forms of visuality. Gavin Adams' paper, drawing on Jonathan Crary's seminal Techniques of the Observer (1990), begins by relating stereoscopic vision and the camera obscura to an epistemological model of seeing which developed in the nineteenth century. In the final and most original part of this paper these theories are applied and further developed in relation to a selection of American, English and French travel fiction writing which portrays travelling and movement primarily as a visual experience. These fictional writings which date between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid nineteenth century include works by X. de Maistre, H. G. Wells, E. Abbott and O. W. Holmes.

In another paper Annika Trommer analysed the relation between Emile Zola and photography. Zola, like Carroll, notoriously combined his activity as a writer with that of photographer, though he began taking photographs only after he stopped writing. Instead of arriving at the obvious conclusion that for Zola writing and photographing were two completely disconnected and discreet practices, Trommer argues for reading photographic techniques, such as for example the panoramic view and chronophotography, as influencing and shaping Zola's theoretical writings on the Naturalist Movement, as well as some of his fictional writings.

The panel that followed this, entitled "The European Avant-Garde" included three papers that were closely connected not only from a diachronical point of view, but also for their preoccupation with the importance of photography within pivotal cultural movements in the 1920's and the 1930's such as realism, Dadaism, Surrealism, as well as its place within the rise of documentary and its relationship with psychoanalysis. The panel opened with Matthias Uecker talking about the interplay of written texts and photography in the German Neue Sachlichkeit movement. This paper compared the work of Ernst Juenger, a prominent writer in the right wing circles of the time, with the collaborative enterprise between the left-wing writer Kurt Tucholsky and the photographer John Heartfield. Through a close comparative analysis of these writers and photographers Uecker showed that photo-texts made in this period that were intended to be objective and authentic documents about contemporary society were in effect complex and carefully constructed pieces of political propaganda in which factual information concealed subtle, and politically charged symbolic meanings.

Tom Kuhn's paper concentrated on the relation between Bertolt Brecht and photography. Taking as his departure point Brecht's much quoted comment of how a single snapshot picture of the Krupp Factory reveals little or nothing about that social and economic organization within it, a quotation that has widely been seen as suggesting that Brecht regarded photography as a superficial, sterile and deceiving form of mimetic realism, Kuhn demonstrates that Brecht's view of photography was a more complex one. As he argues, Brecht was critical of photography in general and of the claims to objectivity of the Die Neue Photographie movement in particular, but his close relationship with film makers and photographers in Stuttgart and Benjamin and his interest in the principles of photomontage indicate a deeper appreciation of the potentiality of photography. As Kuhn argues, Brecht actively and positively engaged with photography and this engagement also played a fundamental role in the formation of his aesthetics.

The panel concluded with Elza Adamowicz's paper on Max Ernst's photomontages. The photomontage was here interestingly viewed as a peculiar kind of photo-text, one which, combines photographic elements with engravings, advertising slogans, graffiti and handwritten or printed texts - captions, titles, short poems or absurd texts - that are inscribed on or around the image. Adamowicz demonstrated the way this particular kind of photo-text subverted the mimetic function of photography by cracking its seamless flat surface. More particularly, she offered a subtle and insightful reading of some of Ernst's photomontages, which, in their diachronic sequence, can be seen as mapping out a shift from a Dadaist to a Surrealist aesthetic.

This conference focused attention on a wide range of writers, their works and their relationship to photography complementing, problematizing or further illustrating the work of scholars dealing with photography and literature from a variety of standpoints. For this reason this event was of great interest for all those who engaged in discourses on photography, cultural studies, visual culture, literature and literary criticism.

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