Photography as Narrative, Aesthetic, and Document in Documentary bande dessinée: Emmanuel and François Lepage's La Lune est blanche (2014)

This article examines tensions between narrative, aesthetic, and documentary functions of photography in comics. Emmanuel and François Lepage's La Lune est blanche (Futuropolis, 2014) furnishes a primary case study. I read La Lune est blanche alongside of Emmanuel Lepage's other travelogue documentary bande dessinée, and in the light of the complementary publication of François Lepage's photography in a companion work, Ombres claires (Perspectivesart9, 2014). While a certain body of scholarship has compellingly maintained that photography should be considered an integral part of comics narrative, I use La Lune est blanche to challenge those arguments for the primacy of narrative as the most useful category for understanding photography within comics. The Lepages' work forcefully mobilizes photography's documentary and aesthetic functions.