Introduction:

Photographic Interventions
Silke Horstkotte
German, Leipzig
Nancy Pedri
English, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Images and Words: The State of the Debate
Since the publication in 1989 of Poetics Todays double issue Art and Lit-
erature (10:1 and 10:2), as well as the special issue devoted to Lessings
Laokoon: Context and Reception ten years later (20:2), the multiple
and varying relations of the visual and the verbal have become key issues
within the humanities in general and in the formation of new inter-, multi-,
or transdisciplinary felds of study in particular. Many theorists have posi-
tioned themselves against Lessings distinction between the verbal as a
temporal art and the visual as a spatial art: instead, they accentuate the
similarities between word and image and, hence, renounce the plurality of
the arts. As early as 1970, Roland Barthes (1970: 7) had urged his readers
We would like to thank the referees and Poetics Today editorial team for their signifcant aid
in the special issues revision.
1. Various models and defnitions exist of what constitutes an inter-, multi- or transdis-
ciplinary object or feld of study. Referring to Roland Barthes, Mieke Bal (2003: 7) has
suggested a defnition of interdisciplinarity as the creation of a new object that belongs to
no-onei.e., an object that cannot be accommodated within any existing discipline (intra-
disciplinary) but which also defes study by simply grouping a number of disciplines around
it (multidisciplinary). A truly interdisciplinary object, then, demands the creation of a new
discipline (such as photography studies or visual culture studies). Transdisciplinarity, on the
other hand, would entail abolishing disciplinary boundaries altogether.
Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-015
2008 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
2 Poetics Today 29:1
to stop thinking of the verbal and visual arts as substantially diferent and
so to appreciate better both literary and visual works as texts. His call was
taken up in the early 1990s, when Mieke Bal (1991: 5) defended the verbal
aspects and structured textuality of visual artifacts, arguing that a new cul-
tural paradigm exists based on the assumption that the culture in which
works of art and literature emerge and function does not impose a strict
distinction between the verbal and the visual domain. In cultural life, the
two domains are constantly intertwined.
The paradigm shift alluded to by Bal has since been widely recognized
as a landslide event in the humanities and associated with the idea of a
pictorial (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994), iconic (Boehm 1994), or visualis-
tic turn (Sachs-Hombach 2003), following upon the linguistic turn
of the 1960s and 1970s (Rorty 1967). However, it would be a mistake to
assume that these theorists of the visual turn want the study of images to
take precedence over literary studies. Rather, one of the important points
raised by W. J. T. Mitchell (1986, 1994) and others concerns the mutual
interdependence of images and words and the impure and mixed medi-
ality of visual as well as verbal artifacts (but see Boehm 1995). Indeed,
the institutionalization and disciplinary formation of the newly emerging
feld of visual culture studies, with which many scholars of the visual turn
associate themselves, aims to overcome the old dichotomy of word and
image. For instance, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001: 3) defne
visual culture as the shared practices of a group, community, or society,
through which meaning is made out of the visual, aural, and textual world of
representations (our emphasis).
The main implications of the emerging visual culture paradigm thus lie
in the areas of cultural theory and analysis and of interdisciplinary prac-
tice. The visual turn nevertheless constitutes a reaction to the growing pres-
ence of images in contemporary culture. There, new visual media, such as
photography, flm, and television, and new forms of intermedial combina-
tion in illustrated newspapers and magazines, in billboard advertisements,
and on the Internet play a key role. That historically much older media,
especially literature, are also afected by the rise of the image is testifed to
by the increasing presence of photography in fction, with which this spe-
cial issue is concerned. In order to position the contributions in this issue
vis--vis existing research, we begin our introduction with an overview of
2. There are a number of good introductions to visual culture studies (Mirzoef 1999, Bar-
nard 2001, Sturken and Cartwright 2001). See also James Elkinss (2003) critique of the
visual culture paradigm. For a juxtaposition of visual studies and art history, see Holly and
Moxey 2002.
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 3
the wider feld of text-and-image studies in the humanities. In the second
section, we introduce the particular issue of photography in literature in
some more detail. In our search for a contemporary critical idiom resting
on the photographic image, it is important to understand what is distinc-
tive about photography and its use in literary fction (as opposed to other
kinds of visual images). Our third section therefore discusses theories in
photography that regard the photograph as a special kind of image which
is distinct from older forms of pictorial representation and which needs its
own analytic tool kit. Finally, we briefy present what the articles collected
here contribute to these debates.
The visual culture paradigm is based on the recognition that images are
invariably traversed or impregnated by language, because all images are
accompanied by some form of speech or writing (Burgin 1982: 144), be it in
the form of a caption, a title, a verbal interpretation in a museum catalog,
or the conversation of spectators. Moreover, art historians and visual cul-
ture scholars alike stress that the image itself frequently incorporates writ-
ing or alludes to verbal narratives and that visual art can in and by itself
be descriptive and thus fulfll representational functions more commonly
associated with language (Alpers 1983). In fact, Bal (1991, 1996) argues that
images, just like texts, can be read and that semiotic theories developed
in literary scholarship can be fruitfully employed for the analysis of visual
artifacts (Bal and Bryson 1991). Sturken and Cartwright (2001: 2531), too,
draw on semiotic theories to explain how spectators negotiate the mean-
ing of an image, while Irit Rogof (2002: 24) points out that visual cul-
ture opens up an entire world of intertextuality in which images, sounds and
spatial delineations are read on to and through one another (our empha-
sis). Conversely, scholars of visual culture stress that writing and speech
call forth images (Christin 1995, Esrock 1994) and that even pure texts
incorporate visuality quite literally the moment they are written or printed
in visual form (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994: 95). Other areas of intersection
between the visual and the verbal have been identifed in verbal and visual
reactions to vision (Horstkotte and Leonhard in press), in verbal descrip-
tions of visual perception ( Jay 1993, Brennan and Jay 1996), and in the
narrativizing of visual culture (Shohat and Stam 2002).
3. The recognition that the relation between the visual and the verbal may be more com-
plex than suggested by Lessings dichotomy has also led to the institution of international
forums, such as the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS), the pub-
lication of entire journals devoted to the issue (Word & Image, Visual Studies, Material Word ),
as well as the organization of many international conferences focused entirely on the ques-
tion of word-and-image relations, including one at Cerisy-la-Salle in 2003 entitled Texte/
4 Poetics Today 29:1
Although the study of word-and-image relations remains characterized
by a multiplicity of methodologies (e.g., semiotics, phenomenology) and
topics of interest (poetry and painting, literature and painting, photog-
raphy and literature, literature and maps, visual poetry, iconicity, and so
forth), recent interpretations of Horaces ut pictura poesis have fostered new
modes of inquiry that bridge many of the disciplines of the humanities
and social sciences. Questions of how to map the interaction of word and
image and, more specifcally, of whether these interactions are of sign
type, reference, or fguration have given rise to a critical interdisciplinary
discourse that forms an alliance of theory, criticism, and art. As Rogof
(2002: 28) states, it is clearly one of the most interesting aspects of visual
culture that the boundary lines between making, theorizing and histori-
cizing [images] have been greatly eroded and no longer exist in exclusive
distinction from each other. This alliance has led to new critical direc-
tions in art history (Cheetham et al. 1998, Harrison 2001), literary theory
(Steiner 1991, Baetens 1993, Baetens and Ribire 2001, Louvel 2002), cul-
tural studies (W. J. T. Mitchell 1994), and flm studies (Metz 1990), among
other disciplines.
The feld of word-and-image relations also refects and is guided by
the interests of contemporary culture as expressed in its artistic practices.
Marjorie Perlof writes that transgression, the crossing of boundaries, dis-
placement . . . constitute the modality of a whole series of contemporary
art works and art events (quoted in Gilman 1989: 22). Cultural artifacts
that collapse the distinction between word and imagea distinction that
in the 1980s grounded the study of word-and-image relations under the
now-contested emphasis on diferencecontinue to fashion, fuel, and in
an important way, justify the fundamentally interdisciplinary critical prac-
tice that the study of word-and-image relations necessitates (Morley 2003).
Accordingly, most scholarship continues to focus on various forms of bi-,
inter-, or transmedial artifacts, since it is here that the relation between
visual and verbal media, and their integration through acts of reception
and interpretation, is most pressing.
A number of suggestions have been made for how one medium gets to
be included in another: for instance, through transcription (Cavell 1985:
3f.), transposition (Clver 1989), interference (Craws 1989), and ekphra-
sis (Hefernan 1991, 1993; Krieger 1992; W. J. T Mitchell 1994; Boehm
Image: nouveaux problmes. Other academic directions in the inquiry into the interaction
of word and image include the formation of the Center for Word-Image Studies at Pratt and
the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG).
4. For an overview of critical literature on word-and-image relations that warns against the
blurring of boundaries separating the disciplines of the humanities, see Gilman 1989.
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 5
1995; Yacobi 1995, 2000, 2002; Wagner 1996; Clver 1997; Klarer 2001). Of
course, the applicability of such models of interart transfer depends on the
specifc forms of integration used in the artifact under scrutiny. The theory
of intermediality commonly distinguishes between manifest and hid-
den intermedial references: manifest intermediality results from actual
combinations of two media, whereas hidden intermediality is consti-
tuted through the implicit evocation of one medium within another (Wolf
1998, Rajewsky 2002). However, such binary oppositions do not account
for the broad range of degrees to which one medium can be said to contain
or include another. At the low end of this spectrum of interart integration
is the allusion within one medium to another, whether in the form of an
ekphrastic description of a visual artifact within a literary text or in the
guise of an images reference to a prior verbal text, for instance, in depict-
ing a biblical story or myth. A higher, more integrative form is reached in
the case of an illustrated text or, conversely, an image which is accompa-
nied by a title: here, both media are present, although one of them remains
dominant. The highest degree of integration appears in forms of collage or
montage, where both media are indispensable.
Current artistic practices of inter- and multimedia art (such as video and
installation art) notwithstanding, however, the scholarship on word-and-
image relations remains ambivalent concerning the mutual compatibility
of words and images: Can the two arts ever form a whole, or are there
simply various forms of combination in which the two media nevertheless
remain distinct? Among those who argue for the possibility of mixed media
art is Claus Clver (1989: 62), who attempts to dispel the long-standing
belief in the semantic incompatibility between verbal and visual texts by
pushing beyond the word-image opposition to develop a full-fedged
theory of intersemiotic [or intermedial] transcriptions. In many modern
multimedia texts, he contends, the interpenetration of visual and verbal
signs is such that the meaning constructed from the text as a whole will
be quite diferent from the meanings derived from the signs alone (ibid.:
57). A similar mode of reasoning underlies Peter Wagners examination
of multimedial allusions that direct the interpretation of both verbal and
visual texts. Wagner (1996: 16) has been particularly infuential in arguing
that in iconotextsdefned by him as artifacts where the verbal and the
visual signs mingle to produce rhetoric that depends on the co-presence
of words and imagestext and image are mutually interdependent in
their ways of producing meaning. Iconotexts integrate the semantics and
5. On narrativity in pictures, see Kemp 1989; Wolf 2002; for narrativity in ekphrasis, see
Yacobi 1995, 2000.
6 Poetics Today 29:1
rhetoric of the verbal component and visual signs into one artifact and
thus urge, if not force, readers to consider their union when engaged in the
negotiation of meaning (ibid.: 2425).
Despite the growing popularity of inter- and multidisciplinary studies
that theorize an integrated set of reading practices, however, some research-
ers working in word-and-image relations continue to stress the distinct
nature of or incompatibility between images and texts. As Darrel Mansell
(1999: 187) notes, a good case can be made that . . . language and image
are irreconcilable sign systems. The German art historian Hans Belting
(1996) has argued that there exist mutually exclusive pictorial and tex-
tual cultures (Bildkultur vs. Textkultur). Another prominent art his-
torian arguing against the applicability of theories and methods from the
textual paradigm to the study of art is James Elkins. In a monograph pro-
vocatively entitled On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, Elkins (1998:
xii) describes how the apparently stable, irreducible elements of images
give way under pressure of inquiry into much more detailed, unruly, his-
torically specifc practices that cannot support a simple translation into
signs or narratives. To see what a picture is, Elkins (ibid.: 47) concludes,
is to see what about it cannot be described. Pictures are always partly
nonsemiotic, and that is enough to stall interpretations that attempt to say
directly what images mean without attending to what they are as images.
Gottfried Boehm (1995: 30), too, emphasizes the principled diference of
the image and argues that the logical structure of the image is grounded
in an exclusively visually accessible, iconic diference (our translation).
Image and text, Boehm maintains, may be translated into each other, but
they cannot fuse into an intermedial image- or iconotext. Silvie Bernier
(1990: 20), studying the relation between text and illustration in Quebec
literature, claims that the semantic distinctiveness of the image needs to
be recognized, as does the constraint on meaning that the image imposes
on the verbal text. In what she calls mixed texts (as opposed to the more
integrative concepts of the image- or iconotext), there is a hierarchy that
governs the relation between word and image, albeit one that changes
according to the particular arrangement of text and images. Although pre-
sented on the same page, Bernier contends, text and image remain seman-
tically distinct.
To sum up, no consensus exists as to the precise delimitation of the feld
of text and image studies, of its objects of study, or of corresponding theories
and methods. Moreover, to date no systematic or comprehensive overview
of image and text relations exists, despite W. J. T. Mitchells (1986, 1994)
attempts in this direction and ron Kibdi Vargas (1989) groundbreaking
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 7
structural system for describing word-and-image relations. The very pos-
sibility of a truly integrative image- or iconotext is contested. Hence, the
feld remains heterogeneous, ranging from the study of visual perception
and how it intersects with language (Elkins 1996, Sturken and Cartwright
2001) to the visual reading of literary texts (Bryson 1988, Gandelman 1991,
Bal 1997, Mergenthaler 2002) to considerations of ekphrasis (Krieger 1992;
Hefernan 1993; W. J. T. Mitchell 1994: 15182; Yacobi 1995, 2002; Boehm
and Pfotenhauer 1995; Clver 1997) and integrative iconotexts (Montan-
don 1990, Wagner 1996).
Photography and Literature
A similar heterogeneity besets the feld of photography in literature. Wit-
ness the sharp divergence there between numerous publications that deal
with a wide variety of topics and texts, on the one hand, and the lack of
comprehensive overviews or systematic methodologies, on the other. This is
not so surprising, because photography in literature has only very recently
emerged as a distinct feld of research. Until a few years ago, photo-text
relations constituted a marginal topic of interest within the broader feld of
word and image studies. Now, however, photography in literature is widely
recognized as one of the focal points of word and image research, with
entire conferences and seminar series and a growing number of publica-
tions devoted to the subject. Although photography in literature certainly
grew out of word and image studies and thus remains related to it, it also
grapples with its own distinct set of concerns geared to the specifcity of
photographic images, their particular aesthetic merit and forms of social
use (see Jacobs 2006a). Kindred felds of inquiry concern the relation-
ship of the still photograph to narrative (Bryant 1996, Hughes and Noble
2003), literary reactions to the changing cultural status of the photograph
6. See also the collections edited by Wolfgang Harms (1990), Klaus Dirscherl (1993), Thomas
Eicher and Ulrich Bleckmann (1994), and Silke Horstkotte and Karin Leonhard (2006).
7. Several conferences and workshops over the past few years have promised to lead to
an increasing institutional recognition of photography in literature. To name but a few
examples, the University of Manitoba hosted a huge international conference on The
Photograph in March 2004 (a selection of contributions has been published in the special
issue The Photograph, Mosaic 37:4 [2004]); in July 2005 the Photography Research Group
at the University of Durham (U.K.) organized a symposium entitled Thinking Photogra-
phyAgain; and since fall 2006 the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies (IGRS)
at the University of London has been conducting the seminar series Photography: Theory,
Practice, and Debate. Consider also the small but growing number of edited collections
dealing with photography in literature (Bryant 1996, Rabb 1998, Jacobs 2006b).
8. See Gualtieri 2006 on the instantaneity of photography in fction.
8 Poetics Today 29:1
(Koppen 1987, Plumpe 1996, Armstrong 1999), the interactions between
photographic and literary theory (Garrett-Petts and Lawrence 2000, Petit
2006), and the emergence of a photo-poetics or verbal equivalent of
photographic techniques and processes (Robinson 2006: 269).
The lively current debates on photography and literature have drawn
attention to the increasing presence of photographic images not only in
the classic genres of illustrated nonfction, such as (auto-)biography, histo-
riography, and memoir writing, but also within the area of fctional writ-
ing in a stricter sense. As a result, the exact delimitations of fctional and
nonfctional writing become increasingly blurred. Because of the photo-
graphs persistent use as documentary evidence, the presence of photog-
raphy in literature almost automatically challenges accepted distinctions
between fction and nonfction. Due to their fragmented, discontinuous,
static nature, photographic images (apart from the relatively rare case of
image sequences) cannot inscribe a before or after. That images do
not narrate gives rise to a self-consciously contrived reality efect, as the
photograph lends itself to a (mock-)documentary aesthetic that may be at
odds with the literary fctions with which it is combined. How, then, do
we look at authentic photographs when they are reproduced in fctional
narrative? Almost always, the inclusion of photographs in literature leads
to an instability of genre concerning both the photograph and its con-
texts. In a paradoxical movement, photographs, when taken out of their
original contexts and included in a fctional narrative, become fctional
themselves. Inversely, the narrative is ostensibly turned toward the real
(i.e., it is substantiated). Analyses of photography in fction thus need to
distinguish carefully between photographys evidentiary moment and the
photographs function within a literary narrative.
Since the multiple discovery of the photographic process in the 1830s
(by Joseph Nicphore Niepce, Louis Daguerre, and William Fox Talbot),
a wide and diverse group of writers of fction have made photography,
photographs, and photographers important points of reference in their
stories. On the whole, the use of photography in literature has revolved
around a shared concern with issues that inform the very process of repre-
sentation, especially the relationship between fact and fction (or the docu-
mentary and the aesthetic), dramatized action and subjective description,
reading agent and material object. However, as shown by the articles col-
lected in this issue, photographs have been used in literature for a wide
9. See the discussion of how new genres bridge the fction/nonfction gap, such as docu-
mentary fction (Foley 1986) or docu-fction (as in the recent special issue DokuFiktion,
Non Fiktion 2 [2006]).
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 9
range of diferent narrative purposes, from aide-mmoire to constructive
force, from documentary evidence to critical idiom.
Like all bimedial artifacts, literary texts that incorporate photographs
can do so to a wide range of degrees. Shortly after the invention of pho-
tography, nineteenth-century literature became preoccupied with the new
mediums aesthetic merit and its consequences for the other arts, as in
the idea of a photographic writing. Soon, however, there emerged more
direct modes of integration. Especially notable among them are ekphrases
of individual photographs (or daguerreotypes) or the taking of photographs
as a plot element, as in Nathaniel Hawthornes House of the Seven Gables. In
her seminal study of photography in nineteenth-century American litera-
ture, Carol Shloss points out that the photographic image was unlike any
earlier kind of picture in the ways it changed practices of literary production
and reception. Shloss (1987: 14) convincingly analyzes the photographic
code as a way in which to read and receive written texts and draws an
extended parallel between the creation of a literary text and the act of
taking a photograph. In the course of the nineteenth century, Shloss (ibid.:
255) argues, the use of the camera made writers of fction more aware of
the implications of using social observation as a precondition of art. For
fction, photography meant an increasingly self-conscious exploration of
seeing and being seen. Nancy Armstrong (1999: 4) expands on this argu-
ment to emphasize its hermeneutical ramifcations as they were shaped
during the mid-Victorian period. Photography, she argues, became basic
psychological equipment for that readership and their defnitive way of
classifying both things and people. This relatively new form of literacy
validates the integration of visual and verbal literacies, a situation that
presents a potentially disruptive challenge to the hegemony of word over
image (Garrett-Petts and Lawrence 2000: 3) and, in so doing, opens up
new and exciting avenues of critical exploration.
The proliferation of photographic images and a heightened awareness
of a photographic literacy has had a signifcant impact not only on the way
reality is perceived but also on how it is narrated. Regarding the epistemo-
logical assumptions behind photography, Megan Rowley Williams (2003: 5)
proposes that [a] paradoxical and almost compulsive desire to narrate the
single meaning behind the photograph defnes our modern negotiation
of the relationship between word and image. Susan Williams also notes
the singularity of photographic truth, the photographs particular way of
10. Cf. the research on uses of photography in French (von Amelunxen 1992), British (Arm-
strong 1999), German (Koppen 1987, Plumpe 1990), and American (Shloss 1987, Davidson
1990) nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature.
10 Poetics Today 29:1
showing historical reality, and its impact on fction. In her examination of
portrait photography in antebellum American fction, Williams (1997: xi)
draws attention to the competitive relation between word and image, fc-
tion and photography: [Antebellum] writers were attracted to the ability
of the photograph to reveal hidden truths, but they also realized that such
truth-telling challenged the pictorial power of their own art. In response
to this threat, they began to redefne the pictorial power of narrative by
using fctional portraits to create an alternate form of representation.
Photographys infuence on how the world is related was so pronounced
that a new, visually oriented form of narrative came into beingirrespec-
tive of whether actual photographs were used or not. As Armstrong (1999:
78) notes, In order to be realistic, literary realism referenced a world of
objects that either had been or could be photographed.
The ekphrastic evocation of photographic images and the idea of a
visual writing in Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu are the subject
of an exhaustive monograph by Mieke Bal (1997). Pointing to the distinc-
tion between visual and verbal images (ibid.: 4), between material photo-
graph and mental image (ibid.: 200), Bal names yet another way in which
photography can be made productive for literary writing: photography
can serve as a constructive principle for literature, that is, as a form of mise
en abyme. She specifes that the photographic mechanism can be seen
at work in the cutting-out of details, in the confictual dialectic between
the near and the far, and in certain zoom efects (ibid.: 201). Moreover,
writers like Franz Kafka have relied on photographs as a source of inspi-
ration, especially when writing about remote and exotic locations (Dutt-
linger 2006).
Besides such indirect, mediated, or ekphrastic references to photogra-
phy, photographs have also had a very concrete, manifest entry into fc-
tion. A more integrative degree of photo-text bimediality is reached in
the use of photographic images as illustrations: for instance, the photo-
gravures by Alvin Langdon Coburn which appeared on the frontispieces
of Henry Jamess New York edition (Bogardus 1984, Nadel 1995, Adams
2000, McWhirter 2006), the reproduction of Julia Margaret Camerons
photographs in Virginia Woolf s Orlando (Gillespie 1993, Humm 2003,
Pedri 2005), or the use of photographic images in the second edition of
Andr Bretons Nadja.
While the photographs in these photo-texts have been treated by pub-
11. The term photo text (unhyphenated) was introduced by Jeferson Hunter (1987) to
describe the collaborative work of writer and photographer. Following Marsha Bryant
(1996), we use it here to include all composite forms of photography and literature, irrespec-
tive of the provenance and aesthetics of the photographs in question.
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 11
lishers as subordinate illustrations, which are often left out of later editions,
collage and montage techniques of photography and text developed in the
later twentieth century in conjunction with contemporary art practices,
especially British pop art, and under the infuence of techniques of flm
montage. Such developments have forced editors and readers to recon-
sider photographys contribution to literature. Notable in this respect are
the works of postwar German writers Alexander Kluge (see Mark Ander-
sons contribution to this issue) and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. More recently,
the development toward ever more integrative forms of photo-text has cul-
minated in a virtual omnipresence of photographic images in (post-)post-
modern fction by writers such as W. G. Sebald or Jonathan Safran Foer.
They rely on scrapbooking techniques, infuenced by literary predecessors
like Alexander Kluge as well as by forms of image-text combination in
illustrated news or on the Internet.
Besides criticism dealing with the literary history of the uses of pho-
tography, a second feld of study concerns the response of literary theory
to photographic images and its intersections with photographic theory.
It is this second aspect with which the articles in Photography in Fic-
tion are concerned. Since the invention of photography, the prolifera-
tion of photographic images has received critical attention, and research
in the later twentieth century continued to focus on issues raised since the
new mediums inception, such as the ontology of the photographic image
(Bazin 1975) and its relation to (literary) realism and to the real (Ortel
1997). The beginnings of a commercial studio photography led to Wal-
ter Benjamins still-infuential critique of the photographs capacity for
infnite reproduction, which distinguishes it from older types of images
(Benjamin 1972; cf. Krauss 1998). The claim that photographs are not art
has long hampered the mediums serious consideration and its integration
into the canon of academic disciplines. Although Victor Burgins (1982)
attempt to think photography, as well as Vilm Flussers philosophy of
photography (2000), have established photography as a theoretical object
constitutive of cultural intervention and philosophical discussion, most
twentieth-century writings on photography remained preoccupied with
12. The articles by Mark Anderson, Timothy Dow Adams, Marianne Hirsch, and Silke
Horstkotte in this issue deal with aspects of Sebalds work. Cf. also Harris 2001; Long 2003;
Shafer 2003; Duttlinger 2004; Horstkotte 2005a, 2005b; Steinlechner 2005; Barzilai 2006;
Tischel 2006; and Gnam 2007.
13. See also Carolin Duttlingers article in this issue.
14. For overviews of photography theory, see Kemp 198083, Squiers 1990, and Price and
Wells 2000. The capacity of images to think and function as theoretical objects is discussed
in Bal 1999: esp. 122.
12 Poetics Today 29:1
the photographs technical production (Batchen 1997), its aesthetic evalua-
tion (Belof 1985), its uses and efects.
Foremost among these are the social uses of photography (Bourdieu
1965), be it as family photographs (Sontag 1977; Hirsch 1981; Belof 1985:
179204) or as tokens of identity (Hamilton and Hargreaves 2001). Other
privileged themes include the oft-repeated connections between photog-
raphy and memory (Hirsch 1997, Edwards 1999, Batchen 2004, Ruchatz
2004), photography and mourning (Liss 1991, Creekmur 1996, Cadava
1997), and photography and trauma (Baer 2002, Duttlinger 2004). While
these are doubtless crucial issues, they have often been privileged to the
detriment of other, equally important questions concerning, for example,
the reception of photography (rather than its production), the spaces of
photography (as opposed to its limitation to an art of time), the representa-
tional aspects of photography, the newly emerging practices of digital pho-
tography in a post-photographic era, and the paradigmatic function of
photography in postmodern writing.
The Photograph: A Special Image
What distinguishes a photograph from other images? Why study photog-
raphy in fction as a topic on its own, related to but distinct from other
studies of word and image relations? More than anything else, it is the
photographs mechanical production and its supposed indexicality which
have set the study of photographic images as well as their use in litera-
ture apart from other images. Theorists who have linked the photographs
specifcity to its mechanical origins include Bazin (1975), Sontag (1977),
and Barthes (1984), among others. As Rosalind Krauss (1981: 26) specifes,
photography is an imprint or transfer of the real; it is a photochemically
processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it
refers in a manner parallel to that of fngerprints or footprints. The prod-
uct of an automatic apparatus, a photograph is always a photograph of
something which actually exists (Walton 1984: 250). It is the photographs
indexical quality that makes it the most realist of images and links it to
the real world. Christian Metz (1990: 156), borrowing Charles S. Peirces
taxonomy, reminds us that the indexical is the process of signifcation
(semiosis) in which the signifer is bound to the referent not by a social con-
vention (= symbol), not necessarily by some similarity (= icon), but by
an actual contiguity or connection in the world: the lightning is the index
of the storm. Born of a photochemical process, this line of reasoning goes,
15. The term is William Mitchells (1994).
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 13
the photograph is a physical trace of (the light refecting of) that which
existed before the camera in the real world. The photograph, in short, is a
concrete impression of a particular object in the real world.
In his extended exploration of the distinctive nature and value of photo-
graphic art, Jonathan Friday (2002: 3) points out the relationship between
the photographs indexicalitythe photographs immediate contact with
the things of the worldand its implicit authority. He argues that photog-
raphys unique photochemical process not only distinguishes photography
from painting and drawing but also afects the way in which photographs
are made, how they are related to the world they depict and their status as
evidence (ibid.: 44).
However, and notwithstanding the persistent belief in the superiority
of the photographic image as a record of the real world, numerous theo-
rists of photography have remarked on the difculty besetting those who
would describe precisely what the photographs connection to the real is.
Stanley Cavell (1971) stands out among them for the way in which he at
once opposes and acknowledges the most compelling arguments of how a
photograph partakes in a privileged relation to the real world. He writes:
We might say that we dont know how to think of the connection between a photo-
graph and what it is a photograph of. The image is not a likeness; it is not
exactly a replica, or a relic, or a shadow, or an apparition either, though all of
these natural candidates share a striking feature with photographsan aura or
history of magic surrounding them. (Ibid.: 1718)
Cavells description of the photograph as not being a likeness or replica
(terms which allude to a relation of similarity or iconicity between a photo-
graph and its referent), a relic (or a trace of something which no longer
is), a shadow (which intimates the photographs indexical quality), or an
apparition (with its strong allusion to a return of that which no longer is)
is coupled with a provocative suggestion that these descriptions are inex-
plicably compelling because of the photographs privileged relation to
16. Other theorists who draw a link between the photographs indexical nature and its spe-
cial realism include Rudolf Arnheim (1974: 15557), Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston
(1985: 31), Marianne Hirsch (1997: 248), and Jan-Erik Lundstrm (1999: 61). Revealingly,
a number of theorists who oppose the idea that photographs possess a unique indexical
relationship to the world tend to admit that the everyday use of photographs sees them as
evidence of the actuality of the objects they represent, precisely because they are traces of
that object (Adams 2000: 45). See, for example, Corey Creekmur (1996: 75) or Joel Snyder
(1980: 502), who, although one of the sharpest critics of the idea that a photograph is a trace
of the real, admits: It seems to me that the conclusive refutations of copy or illusion theories
somehow fail to be convincing; we are left with a strong feeling, after all the refutations are
advanced, that there must, nonetheless, be a natural or privileged or unreasoned relation
between realistic picture and world (see also Snyder and Allen 1975: 151).
14 Poetics Today 29:1
the real world. By drawing on notions of aura (as Walter Benjamin uses
the term), history (as John Tagg conceives of it), or magic (as is often
claimed by Roland Barthes) to explain both descriptions of photographs
and photographs as objects in themselves, Cavell betrays the frustration
that fuels discussions of what exactly distinguishes the photograph from
other images. He is unable, in other words, to express what, if anything, is
peculiarly photographic about the photograph.
Despite such obvious conceptual difculties and despite the recourse
to numerous creative techniques that expose as constructed the sense of
the photographs privileged relation to the real (collage, montage, salient
examples of framing, posing, retouching, and the use of flters, up to the
new possibilities ofered by digital manipulation software), the almost auto-
matic association of the photograph with the real, the authentic, and the
referent proves difcult to break. Indeed, the myth of photographic truth
(Sturken and Cartwright 2001: 17)the unquestioned assumption that the
photograph shows what has been (Barthes 1984)continues to govern
the perception of photographs, even though we know that the objectivity
of technical images is an illusion (Flusser 2000: 15). As Marita Sturken
and Lisa Cartwright (2001: 17) specify: It is a paradox of photography that
although we know that images can be ambiguous and are easily manipu-
lated or altered, particularly with the help of computer graphics, much of
the power of photography still lies in the shared belief that photographs
are objective or truthful records of events. The use of photographs as reli-
able documents in courtrooms and on passports and other ofcial docu-
ments attests to how photographs are perceived to be truthful records of
the real world. Belief in the photographs objective truthfulness persists
even in what William Mitchell (1994) calls a post-photographic era, an
age in which the photomechanical image is being replaced by digitally
manipulated or constructed images.
A second feature that sets the photograph apart from other images is its
indiscriminate recording of all the details that were present before the cam-
eras eye, unlike a painted canvas, where the artist makes choices as to what
to include. Since the early days of the new medium, critics have remarked
on the photographs unselectiveness or all-inclusiveness and linked it to
the seemingly authorless quality of the photograph. In an article for the
New Yorker, Janet Malcolm (1989) poignantly called this aspect of photog-
raphy the cameras perverse noticingness, which promotes to center stage
objects that the eye normally relegates to the background. The photo-
graph works to alter our perception of the world by drawing attention to a
17. On which see Carolin Duttlingers contribution to this issue.
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 15
marginal detail, one that would go unnoticed if it were not for the fact that
it was photographed and thus framed. Ultimately, the automatic inclusion
of daily, ordinary, even banal details within the photographs frame afects
the way the world is seen. Through the everydayness of photographic aes-
thetics, the familiar (and oftentimes overlooked) aspects of the real world
are more readily perceived and thus gain in importance.
Another notable diference between photographic and other visual
images, and one which crucially directs its use in literature, concerns the
photographs use as a commemorative image (Hirsch 1997, Edwards 1999,
Batchen 2004). Linda Haverty Rugg (1997: 23) dwells on the mnemonic
power of photography to specify that the line between memory and photo-
graphs blurs, with photographic-era children uncertain as to whether their
memories of childhood are memories of events they witnessed or photo-
graphs they have seen. Susan Sontag (2003: 8485) also comments on the
strong fusion between photography and memory, suggesting that photo-
graphs are very particular instruments of remembrance. Rethinking pho-
tographys depiction of war and disaster, she observes that atrocities that
are not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of
which we simply have had very few images . . . seem more remote. Her
meditation on the reception of war photography in contemporary society
leads her to conclude: In an era of information overload, the photograph
provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for
memorizing it (ibid.: 22). In the easy equation of photography and mem-
ory, the photograph is the medium that connects the present to the past,
thus oscillating between life and death. Due to this bracketing of photog-
raphy with memory, the study of photography favors a distinct set of dis-
cursive frameworks that not only revolve around memory but also involve
such related topics as postmemory or a second-generation memory that
has been constructed through narratives (Hirsch 1997, 2001; Liss 1998),
traumatic memory (Baer 2002), death (Sontag 1977, Barthes 1984), mourn-
ing (Creekmur 1996), and bereavement (Cadava 1997).
A privileged topic of photography studies concerns photographys
function within the family, where it likewise serves as a tool of remem-
brance as well as of family formation (see, e.g., Belof 1985: 179204).
Julia Hirsch (1981: 32) adopts a business model to accentuate photogra-
phys formative role in conceptions of family; she writes: Family photog-
raphy, like family portraiture, sustains the notion of the family as a corpo-
rate entity, thereby stressing the infuence of earlier pictorial practices,
18. The last aspect is of particular interest to scholars who study postmortem photography
(Burns 1990, Ruby 1995).
16 Poetics Today 29:1
such as the painted family portrait, on the taking and use of family photo-
graphs. According to her, family photography authenticates not how a
particular family is, but rather how society perceives family, a perception
that is communal because it is based on the established models of family
representation that photography helps consolidate and promote. By pro-
jecting an accepted model of family, that is, by showing family (its power
relations, its group dynamic, the roles of its individual subjects, etc.) as it
has come to be idealized through representation, the family photograph
functions to perpetuate a highly constructed image of family. As with
all societal myths, prevalent conceptions of family afect the taking of
a photograph. At the same time, however, family photography fulflls
an ideological function: it adopts, proliferates, and legitimizes the set of
techniques developed by a given society to regulate and, indeed, natural-
ize the concept of family.
That this regulative efect is closely tied to the mechanics of the cam-
era, to the frequency with which family snapshots are taken, and to the
omnipresence of family photographs (aspects which distinguish family
photography from earlier forms of pictorial representation) is stressed
by Marianne Hirsch (1997). She examines the reading of photographs by
family members as well as the processes (both conscious and unconscious)
that direct the taking of family photographs. Following Pierre Bourdieu
(1990), Hirsch (1997: 1011) specifes that the camera and the family album
function as the instruments of [a] familial gaze, one that situates human
subjects in the ideology, the mythology, of the family as institution and
projects a screen of familial myths between camera and subject. The cam-
era, in other words, interrupts and shapes, records and constructs family
relations. As an apparatus whose social functions are integrally tied to
the ideology of the modern family (ibid.: 7), photography is instrumental
in inscribing the individual subject within a family group. It also exerts a
forceful infuence on how society thinks about the family, one of its most
valued and fundamental social groups. In short, photography is implicated
in the proliferation of sameness and the constraint for assimilation (see
Barrett 2000).
That photography confrms, creates, and naturalizes standard models of
conduct is in line with the ideas proposed by a growing group of research-
ers who link photography with discourses of power and state apparatuses
(Tagg 1988, Solomon-Godeau 1991, Lalvani 1996, Hamilton and Har-
greaves 2001). Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1991: xviv), for example, closely
examines the dense interweave of the social and the economic, the cul-
tural, and the political in the production and reception of photographs;
she insists on the indivisibility of photography from its historical underpin-
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 17
nings, arguing that photographs are routinely used to confrm the truth of
dominant ideologies. The photograph is not, indeed cannot be, a neutral
picture of daily life. The camera can only produce highly coded images
which are governed by the relevant historical specifcationsthe condi-
tions of existence and institutionalized knowledge that operate unnoticed
in the gestures of everyday life. Accordingly, photography is a powerful
social technology that works alongside dominant discourses, epistemolo-
gies, and critical practices to produce, ofer, and institute social realities.
Thus, the photograph not only interpellates its subject in the ideological
feld of the photographic gaze (Sturken and Cartwright 2001: 100). The
photographs particular power to record the real world reaches beyond the
photographic frame to communicate the photographs subject as it inter-
sects with a network of social practices. Hence, the photograph positions
that which it images within social and cultural settings that constrain the
way it is conceived.
The need to examine the interaction between photography and lit-
erature in terms of interpretative strategies that recognize the distinctive
qualities of photographic representation has been duly noted by Marsha
Bryant (1996) in her introduction to Photo-Textualities, one of the few col-
lections of critical essays that deal exclusively with photography in fc-
tion. It is unfortunate that many literary scholars who approach the topic
rely unquestioningly on Roland Barthess still-infuential studium/punctum
dichotomy (1984), while more nuanced theories of photographic reception,
such as Victor Burgins (1982) concept of reading photographs, are often
undeservedly ignored. As Burgin (ibid.: 144) stresses, photographic images
have no stable meaning or reference:
The intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts
inscribed in terms of what we may call photographic discourse, but this dis-
course, like any other, engages discourses beyond itself, the photographic
text, like any other, is the site of a complex intertextuality, an overlapping
series of previous texts taken for granted at a particular cultural and historical
conjuncture.
Burgin reminds us that the meaning of a photograph is far from self-evident;
instead, it is the result of a dialogic interaction among the photograph, its
contexts, and its spectators. The critical appraisal of photographs inside
and outside of fction therefore requires a careful consideration of the
image, the changing discourses that inform it, and both past and present
contexts. The articles collected in this special issue have attempted to high-
light the processual quality of this reading, which combines semiotic and
afective responses.
18 Poetics Today 29:1
Photography in Fiction
The essays in Photography in Fiction build on twentieth-century debates
relating to photography in order to reexamine and reframe the oft-repeated
associations between the photograph and memory, death, identity, or wit-
nessing. Taken together, the articles collected here invite reconsideration
of some of the most popular notions informing the study of photography,
in the belief that such investigations will lead to alternative approaches
to word-and-image relations and, in particular, those between photog-
raphy and fction. The critical (re-)appraisal of such popular notions as,
for example, Benjamins aura, Hirschs postmemory, and Lessings time/
space distinction through the examination of photography in fctionso
we hopegives rise to new directions in the analysis of the photographic
image as well as of photographys role in fction. Starting from the premise
that the photographic image is a special type of image whose history inter-
sects with literary history, the articles collected here explore the complex
reading practices that ensue when the photographic image mixes with lit-
erary fction. Whether a close analysis of photography in a specifc literary
text or a critical proposal of a new way of reading photographically, each
essay considers how the complex interrelation of photography and fction
afects the understanding of both the photographic image and the literary
text and of the notion of the fctional.
Following Liliane Louvels lead in Photography as Critical Idiom and
Intermedial Criticism, the issue thus aims to develop a critical idiom based
on the photographic image and to take into account the visual quality of
texts. The issue is divided into three sections. The frst part, Photography
as Critical Idiom, considers photography as a critical idiom and explores
several aspects of photo-text interactions that have hitherto been neglected
in image-text studies. Taking up Kibdi Vargas (1989) call for a set of crite-
ria for describing word and image relations, Louvel attempts an overview of
the multiple and varied forms of photo-text interaction found in twentieth-
century fction while simultaneously setting up a feld of inquiry for a new,
truly intermedial criticism. Louvel argues persuasively for the ambiguity
of photography as situated between document and icon. Accordingly, the
presence of photography in fction more or less automatically upsets or,
better, subverts the distinction between fction and nonfction. Moreover,
not only does the photograph stand uneasily between document and icon,
it also constitutes a form of visualization that is at once an art of time and
an art of space, because the photograph superimposes a past on a present
moment.
One aspect that crucially determines the reception of intermedial
photo-texts concerns the spatial layout of photography and printed text.
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 19
Silke Horstkottes article Photo-Text Topographies: Photography and the
Representation of Space in W. G. Sebald and Monika Maron explores
the consequences of diferent photo-text arrangements. To this end, she
reads the photograph as a layered space linking represented reality with
the space of its reception while also taking into account the problems that
ensue when a meaningfully arranged photo-text is rearranged in its trans-
lation into another language.
We have entitled the second part of this collection Moving Beyond to
indicate a point of departure for the theoretical debates touched upon in
the essays by Carolin Duttlinger, Marianne Hirsch, and Mark M. Ander-
son. Duttlingers Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura
of Photography revisits Benjamins aura, a much-used (if not overused)
concept of photography theory, especially in what concerns photogra-
phys association with death. She points out that the aura of photography
is not an intrinsic property of the medium but rests on an interpersonal
and reciprocal dynamic of (photographic) reception. Aura thus triggers
a process of reception and encounter as well as challenging preconceived
methodological oppositions between criticism and autobiography, theory
and fction.
Another central term of photography studies in general, and of pho-
tography in literature more specifcally, is the concept of postmemory,
which refers to the photographs function in the intergenerational transfer
of memory (Hirsch 1997, 1999, 2001; Liss 1991, 1998; Long 2003, 2006;
Hofman 2004; van Alphen 2004). In an essay especially written for this
collection, The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch defends
the concept against some of the criticisms that have been leveled against it
and considers the role of photography for fctional memory transfers. What
specifc bodily, psychic, and afective impact, Hirsch asks, does the trauma
of the Holocaust and its aftermath still have at the turn of the twenty-frst
century? The ways in which one trauma can recall or reactivate the efects
of another exceed the bounds of traditional historical archives and method-
ologies, but they are powerfully evoked in works by second-generation
writers and visual artists relying largely on photography. Through a read-
ing of Art Spiegelmans Maus and W. G. Sebalds Austerlitz, Hirsch argues
that photography functions as more than a powerful medium of transmis-
sion in these texts: photographic images related to the Holocaust provide
the postgeneration with a space both of authentication and, paradoxically
perhaps, of projection and invention.
Anderson, in Documents, Photography, Postmemory: Alexander
Kluge, W. G. Sebald, and the German Family, takes up the postmemory
concept and applies it to a diferent contextthat of postWorld War II
Germany. He points out that the prevalence of slow and cold docu-
20 Poetics Today 29:1
mentary images in German literature (as opposed to the trivial, immediacy-
seeking images in Western pop art) can be traced back to the prominent
status of images in National Socialism, which led to a deep-seated distrust
of the image in postwar Germany. Moreover, the problematic documen-
tary status of the photograph (as witnessed by the scandal around the frst
Wehrmacht exhibition, Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht
19411944) and, consequently, its inherent epistemological instability call
attention, among other things, to the fctional processes involved in repro-
ducing and reading photographs. Photographs, Anderson concludes, serve
a crucial function in literary fction: to introduce a set of questions about
reality and its representation. By comparing Sebalds work with that of
his compatriot Kluge, Anderson highlights the impact that the Nazis reli-
ance on visual propaganda strategies had on German postwar viewers and
media artists alike. In contrast to the fast images of British and North
American pop art, these two German writers rely on images that invite
a careful refection and consideration of their contexts. However, while
Kluges documentarism relies on a form of defamiliarization that works on
formal as well as on afective registers, Sebalds use of images, arising at a
later historical juncture, attempts to refamiliarize the family photographs
of individuals whose trauma lies deep in their past.
The third part of this collection, The Photograph, a Textual Excess?
explores some new directions for studying the photo-texts uneasy status
between document and fction. Opening this fnal group of essays, Nancy
Pedris Documenting the Fictions of Reality critiques popular tra-
ditional attitudes that inform documentary photography by analyzing
the photographs ambiguous status in Barthess (auto-)biography Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes, where the genres reliance on photographic evi-
dence is coupled with an overt demystifcation of the photographs evi-
dentiary value. Pedri emphasizes that, in life writing, photography often
raises questions about the nature of the documentary itself and concludes
that the photograph stands as factual evidence not so much because of any
privileged link it may have to the real world, but rather because it invites
(or even demands) the imaginative speculation of readers.
As Timothy Dow Adams points out in his contribution, Photographs
on the Walls of the House of Fiction, the status of photography in fc-
tion has undergone dramatic changes since the age of photographic real-
ism studied in detail by Nancy Armstrong (1999). Novelists writing in the
nineteenth century described and sometimes (as in the New York edition
of Henry Jamess works) even reproduced photographs in order to add
verisimilitude to their writing, but postmodernist writers have come to
use photographs as the reverse of representation: as a revelation of the
Horstkotte and Pedri

Photographic Interventions 21
invisible, unseeable, and, indeed, unknowable. Specifcally, the photo-
graphs persistent and ubiquitous contemporary association with memory,
trauma, and death turns photographic images into privileged represen-
tations of the Holocaust and of Holocaust memories. Paradigmatic of
this kind of contemporary usage are the novels of the recently deceased
German writer Sebald, whom Anderson, Hirsch, Horstkotte, and Louvel
also cite in their contributions. Indeed, Sebald has probably taken the inte-
grative aspects of photography in fction more seriously than any other
contemporary writer. His self-conscious play with photo-text layouts and
with intermedial and intertextual allusions thus predestine his writing as a
subject of our inquiry.
Ever since its invention, photography has been intimately bound up
with the economy of the capitalist state. In his essay Paratextual Pro-
fusion: Photography and Text in Bertolt Brechts War Primer, Jonathan
Long considers the problematic case of a photographic book that provides
a Marxist critique of capitalism: problematic because of Marxisms long-
standing suspicion of and iconoclastic aversion to the image. A test case
of what Long terms paratextual profusion, Bertolt Brechts 1955 War
Primer attempts to control the meaning of documentary news photographs
through the excessive use of captions. However, this combinatory practice,
originally born of a deep distrust of the image in Marxism, unintention-
ally serves to establish multiple modes of address; and it thereby creates a
fuid subjectivity that is quite at odds with the kind of univocal ideological
viewing position Brecht sought to impose on his audience.
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