Literature and Photography

Bibliographic Data

ID5693293
AuthorsElen Welch (0000-0003-1106-4280, University of Aberdeen, corresponding author), Edward Welch (University of Aberdeen)
Year2019
Volume73
Issue3
Pages434-444
Publication date2019-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-1128 • E-ISSN: 1468-2931
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/fs/knz129
OpenAlexW2940846757
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited13

What is at stake in the order of things? Does it matter that this is an e tat pre sent of literature and photography, rather than of photography and literature? In one sense, the word order is neutrally sequential, or at most, reflective of the chronological and technological reality that literature predates photography as a mode of representation. Considering the relationship between literature and photography is therefore a matter of exploring how literature has come to accommodate, respond to, engage with, or understand the strange new medium of 'light writing' since it came on the scene in the early nineteenth century. As Franc ois Brunet notes in his survey of the question, 'most accounts of photography's relationship to literature published so far have been told by literary scholars, from the point of view of literature, and are therefore more often identified as studies of "literature and photography"'; but Brunet poses the inversion of the terms in the title of his own book as a challenge, or at the very least, 'somewhat provocative'. 1 He takes issue with the implications of hierarchy that lurk in the placing of literature before photography, a hierarchy which might result simply from the age difference between them, but which inevitably comes to suggest greater or lesser degrees of artistic and cultural legitimacy.

Art · Photography · Visual arts · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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