Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (review)

‘The idea in this study’, writes Andy Stafford, ‘is to look at how photography makes writers write’ (p. 8). His book achieves this aim with specific reference to the photo-text, a genre that it sets out to introduce, classify, and theorize. The parameters and corpus of the book are meticulously defined in the Introduction, which explains in detail why the examples will be limited to French-language works published in the 1990s, and why the photo-roman, for instance, will not be studied. Stafford then distinguishes between three types of photo-text: the collaborative, in which a writer and a photographer create a text together; the retrospective, in which a writer writes about photographic images from the past; and the self-collaborative, in which the writer and photographer are the same person. Chapter 1 continues in theoretical vein, positioning the book with reference to Vilém Flusser, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Roland Barthes, and offering more categories in which different kinds of relationship can hold between image and text. The subsequent chapters benefit from this conceptual mise en scène and analyse instances of a variety of photo-texts, from the Hexagon and beyond. It is therefore advisable to read these chapters in order, although this reader at least was tempted to start with the writers and photographers whose names were most intriguing. Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which discuss Anne-Marie Garat’s Photos de familles, Denis Roche, John Szarkowski, and Régis Debray, and Errance by Raymond Depardon, analyse the ethics of the photo-text; they also exemplify the retrospective (Chapters 2 and 3) and self-collaborative (Chapter 4) categories. Chapters 5 to 9, by contrast, constitute an analysis of the aesthetics of the genre, through reading works by Tahar Ben Jelloun created in collaboration with two French photographers, Bruno Barbey and Jean Marc Tingaud; Leïla Sebbar’s writings on photographs of Algeria by Marc Garanger; Patrick Chamoiseau’s collaborative work with Rodolphe Hammadi; Philippe Tagli’s ‘self-collaborative’ photo-texts of the Parisian banlieue; and Bernard Noël’s retrospective collaborations with photographs of the Paris Commune. These chapters are all fairly short but offer concise and engaging analyses. We see collaborations going sour (Sebbar and Garanger), writers ‘hijacking’ defenceless old photographs through writing new captions for them (Bernard Noël), and instances of the writer’s desire to make photographs ‘speak’ through comment (Garat) and/or through a specific arrangement in anthologies (Debray, Roche). Also fascinating are the collaborations between French-language texts and photographs of ‘exotic’ locations, created, in all three of the cases examined here, by non-French writers and French photographers. Various theoretical points are developed through the course of these chapters, which, although they can be read as separate case studies, constitute a convincing narrative that culminates, in the Conclusion, with a definition of photo-essayism, the relationship between photo-texts and orality, and an exciting hypothesis regarding cultural periodization at the start of the twenty-first century. This is a densely written but highly readable book, an invaluable resource for students of photography and scholars interested in the relationship between photography and writing/speaking — or, indeed, in any configuration of image and text.