Photography and Literature
'Brunet's beautifully illustrated study shows how, starting with the British pioneer William Fox Talbot, photography has shed this aura of objectivity to become a medium of individual expression. Today, photography is the "new muse of literature" and it subverts the very reality its images were once thought to reflect with such veracity.' – The Guardian
'It is the scope and enthusiasm with which Photography and Literature connects the literary impulse with photography's vision of the world that makes this book a welcome addition.'
– Source magazine
'This sumptuously illustrated volume . . . examines the shifting relationship between literature and photography from the latter’s invention in 1939 up to the present . . . a fascinating overview of the prolonged cultural encounters between visual and verbal texts and has the value of guiding the reader towards more specialized studies of this crucially important subject.' – Modern Language Review
'As Brunet skillfully negotiates more than 150 years of photographic history, he offers a coherent argument for the emergence of photography as a kind of writing, with possibilities for narrative and fiction that exceed its promise to capture the world as it is.'
– The Wilson Quarterly
'an excellent and thought-provoking read.' – MetapsycologyRoland Barthes, one of photography’s most influential critics, once described the ‘trouble’ introduced by the advent of photography. Studies of literature and photography tend to assess the literary effects of photography, with literature seen as the older, broader, more established cultural form, and photography the new, alien upstart. Photography and Literature instead reverses the angle of vision to examine photography’s encounters with literature from the point of view of photography, providing a new way of understanding its interplay with literature and the printed page.
François Brunet begins by showing how photography’s invention and its publication were shaped by written culture, both scientific and literary. In turn he examines its early and durable incarnation in the book format, the ongoing and often repetitive ‘discovery’ of photography by writers, and, finally, how, in the twentieth century, photography and literature are seen to trade tools and even merge formats. He also focuses on writings by photographers, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s groundbreaking exploration of photography in The Pencil of Nature of the 1840s, to Raymond Depardon’s correspondence or Sophie Calle’s projects with Jean Baudrillard and Paul Auster. Ultimately, Brunet argues that the histories of photography and literature since 1840 have been drawing closer together, and that their convergence has provided recent writing with a new ‘photo-textual’ genre.
Offering a wealth of examples from autobiography, manifestos and fiction, and a fascinating variety of images from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first, Photography and Literature will be of interest to anyone passionate about the historic relationship of text and image.François Brunet is Professor of American Art and Literature at the University Paris Diderot – Paris 7, and is author of La Naissance de l’idée de photographie (2000), co-editor of Images in the West: Survey Photographs in French Collections, 1860–1880 (2007), and a regular contributor to journals, including Transatlantica, Etudes Photographiques and Aperture.
220 x 190 mm
176 pages
96 illustrations, 74 in colourPaperback with flaps
978 1 86189 429 8
April 2009
£15.95
