Literature and Photography (Marchi) Flashcards
When we talk about “literature and photography” are we presenting a neutral chronological order, or are we implying a power hierarchy between the media
– power hierarchy is implied, emergence of photography challenged existing modes of representation, particularly impacting literature and how literature perceived itself.
– Paragone sees textual and visual arts as distinct and in competition with one another
– Sonntag argues photography appropriates reality, creating “slices” that can be owned and circulated, unlike literature, etc.; interpretations of reality are filtered through the artist’s subjectivity.
– implies a power hierarchy, often placing photography as a challenge to literature’s authority as a mode of representation. This hierarchy, however, is continuously questioned and complicated by the diverse perspectives presented in the sources.
How do we conceptualize the “and” between the two? And what does it mean to take an intermedial approach to this problem?
– So far, the relationship has been understood through the lens of the paragone, a framework that emphasizes the distinction and competition between textual and visual art forms. An intermedial approach offers an alternative, urging us to move beyond a hierarchical understanding of the relationship between literature and photography.
– Instead of viewing them as separate and competing entities, an intermedial approach considers how these media interact, intersect, and mutually inform each other.
– It acknowledges that the boundaries we establish between media are often conventional rather than absolute.
– An intermedial approach recognizes that both literature and photography have their own strengths and limitations as media.
– An intermedial lens necessitates moving beyond hierarchical comparisons and embracing the complex interplay between these media. It is about recognizing their distinct affordances, acknowledging their points of intersection, and examining how meaning is generated through their interaction.
How does literature engage (and has engaged) with the photographic? How do writers reflect on photography in order to assess the possibilities and limitations of their own literary medium?
See how photography entered the literary field –> thematically, figuratively, formally, materially
Is there a specificity to the photographic image (as distinct, for example, from painting), and how does it affect the text-image relationship?
– The consensus across various authors and perspectives is that photography possesses distinct qualities stemming from its indexicality – its direct relationship to the referent, the object captured in the image.
* Poe: highlights photography’s accuracy and truthfulness as its defining feature
* Sonntag: emphasizes photography’s indexicality as its key differentiator. She posits that photography’s ability to preserve traces of the physical world, unlike literature or painting, which can be produced from memory or imagination, photography necessitates the presence of its referent. This inseparability from the real grants photography a strong documentary and forensic function.
* Barthes: stubbornness of the Referent; referent in a photograph is so intertwined with the image that the material support of the photograph itself becomes almost invisible, separating the image from the referent destroys both
When was photography first invented?
1839 by Louis Daguerre
What’s a daguerreotype?
the first type of photograph, refers to the image produced, through the technique implemented by Daguerre
Photography in its early stages
- the emergence of photography in the 19th century roughly coincides with the age of Literary Realism
- broader public was mostly introduced to photography through written descriptions
- Throughout the 19th century, photography was compared to literature through the paragone, a paradigm of competition between the arts that understands the textual and the visual as separate and fundamentally different modes of representations.
The daguerreotype as a literary marketing tool
think image of Poe and Whitman with the fake butterfly on the cover of 1889 edition of Leaves of Grass
How did photography enter the literary field?
- As a marketing tool for both literary authors (e.g., E. A. Poe and Walt Whitman) and books (with covers, frontispieces, illustrations, etc.).
- Thematically: photography as a social practice and photographs as objects to be referenced and depicted in literary texts.
- Figuratively: photography as a source of literary images and metaphors, also meant to critically reflect on literature’s own practices of seeing and image-making.
- Formally: photography as an inspiration for different ways of seeing and techniques of writing (as in the case of Realism).
- Materially: as the inclusion and explicit presence of photographs in photo-textual cultural forms.
What are Sonntag’s arguments in “In Plato’s Cave”?
- proposes an ethico-political approach
- “denaturalizes” the sense of sight, and underlines how seeing is rather a social practice, something that we learn and that is thus necessarily ideologically inflected.
- The question for her then becomes: Which ways of seeing do photographs teach us? How do they shape our relation to the world? —> Sontag invites us to critically question and self-examine our visual practices.
- photography played a key role in the development of state surveillance and modern bureaucracy, and helped institutionalize the heterosexual nuclear family as well as the emergence of tourism as a capitalist practice of consumption
- Sontag remains within the paradigm of the paragone, often mentioning the radical differences that she identifies between textual and visual communication.
Text vs Image: What are Sontag’s Three Theses?
- Photography appropriates
- Photography passes itself as evidence
- Photography lacks signification
- Photography appropriates
- While literature, paintings, and drawings are interpretations of reality filtered through the subjectivity of the artist, photography produces (allegedly objective) “slices” of reality that can be owned, collected, and circulated.
- As Sontag argues: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power” (2).
- Through photography, for Sontag, we develop a relation to the world that is “voyeuristic” and one of “capture,” based on single snapshots, discontinuity, and fragmentation.
- Photography passes itself as evidence
- In comparison to other media, and despite the possibility of manipulation of the image, photography is traditionally linked to objectivity and truthfulness in representation.
- The indexicality of the photographic image (i.e., the fact that photography is a medium that preserves traces of the physical world through optical, chemical, and now digital processes) is what fundamentally distinguishes it from other modes of representation.
- Unlike literature or painting, in fact, photography cannot be produced in the absence of its referent (i.e., it cannot be produced from memory or imagination) and it therefore has a strong documentary (and even forensic) function.
- Photography lacks signification
- For Sontag, photographs, are characterized by “muteness” (18) and, in themselves, cannot explain anything.
- If photographs cannot explain or make us understand, it is because:
1. they only remain on the surface, asking the viewer to “feel, intuit” (17) the depth that lies beyond the image
2. as images made to record “what is” or “has been” (i.e., the status quo), they invite us to accept the world as it is and are thus not conducive to thinking
3. as predominantly spatial and lacking temporal development photographs are fundamentally non-narrative.
Photography as Weapon
- According to Sontag, photography not only appropriates and captures, but there is “an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (4).
- The camera thus works, at least metaphorically, as a “weapon” and, “[h]owever hazy our awareness of this fantasy, it is named without subtlety whenever we talk about ‘loading’ and ‘aiming’ a camera, about ‘shooting’ a film” (10).
- She notices how cameras are marketed in terms that closely recall guns and cars (“automatic,” easy to “aim, focus, and shoot”) and, although the “camera/gun does not kill,” “there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture”
Photography As Non-Intervention
- Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention
- The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.
According to Sonntag, can photographs intervene morally and politically in the world?
- Sontag argues that photographs can shock the viewer, and thus affect them morally, only insofar as they show something new and unexpected.
- However, given the increasing circulation of images of horror, photography ends up normalizing the suffering of others, giving us “a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary” (15).
- For Sontag, photographs can ethically affect the viewer, and even to be conducive to political action, only when a certain political consciousness is already in place. Their role is, at best, only secondary and accessory.
Roland Barthes “Camera Lucida”
- proposes an affective approach (taking emotions and bodily affects such as love, disgust, intensity and desire into account) to photography
- starts with an ontological perspective and partakes in the idea of paragone too
What is the essence of photography according to Barthes?
stubbornness of the Referent, although he is aware that trying to essentialize photography is nothing short of a paradoxical operation
What is the referent according to Barthes?
The referent (ie., the thing in the world that the image portrays and refers to) is “stubborn” because it clings to the photographic film to the point that the photograph as such (i.e., the material support) is rendered invisible
What is the studium according to Barthes?
refers to an approach to the photograph that stems from a basic cultural, social, and historical interest. A photograph, for example, can be interesting because it gives us a glimpse into the everyday life of different cultures, informs us about political conflicts in far off regions of the world, teaches us how people used to dress in other eras, etc.
What is the punctum according to Barthes?
what “punctuates” (as both puncture and interruption) the studium. The punctum is not something we find in the image, but “an element which rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow, and pierces me” (26). It is a detail that arrests and troubles the gaze. It cannot be named and thus cannot be put into language –> picture, hand on knee is the punctum
An Intermedial Approach
- Sontag’s and Barthes’ books are critical works combining text and image
- Barthes –> media combination; photographs are explicitly and materially inserted within the text. Barthes also produces verbal descriptions of these photographic images (ekphrasis)
- Sontag –> intermedial references; photographs (and movie scenes) are implicitly evoked through description
Paul Auster And Spencer Ostrander: Bloodbath Nation (2023)
- Example of media combination
- Photography as a weapon
- Text and images
