The Camera Speaks

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ­LITERATURE.

By François Brunet. Reaktion. 173 pp. $­29.95

Reviewed by Andrew ­Starner

Walker Evans’s image of Allie Mae Burroughs, a share­­cropper’s wife whose tautly drawn lips attest to the torments of the Great De­pression, is perhaps more famous than the 1941 book in which it appears. A collaboration between Evans and writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men docu­mented the lives of Alabama sharecroppers at a critical national moment. But Evans’s photo­graphs are not simply textual illustrations; indeed, Agee later admitted that he felt he was providing a ­book-­length commentary on Evans’s photo­graphs. As a powerful work of art, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men transcends its subjects and their story to become something more than a strict ­documentary.

The photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs is one of the more than 90 beautiful images that appear in Photog­raphy and Literature, a theoretical study by François Brunet, a professor of American art and literature at Paris Diderot University. From the moment of photography’s inception in the 1830s, Brunet argues, the medium’s scientific, technological capabilities were in tension with its experiential, artistic potential. As Brunet skillfully negotiates more than 150 years of photographic history, he offers a coherent argu­ment for the emergence of photography as a kind of writing, with possibilities for narrative and fiction that exceed its promise to capture the world as it ­is.

As a subject, the relationship of photography and fiction is hardly new. As early as 1840, Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard experimented with artifice in his Self­Portrait as a Drowned Man. (Bayard was cheated of recognition by the inventor of the daguerreotype, ­Louis-Jacques-­Mandé Daguerre, who publicly an­nounced his method of photographic repro­duction after Bayard was persuaded to hold off on unveiling a rival process.) Bayard posed as if dead, and wrote in an inscription on the back of the photograph: “The Gov­ern­ment, which has been only too generous to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself.”

While the ­19th-­century realist novel, like the photograph, is a product of that period’s investment in capturing life as it appears, writers and artists have increasingly used photography to blur the line between fiction and reality. In Brunet’s account, artists such as Cindy Sherman use photography not for its documentary fidelity but for its malleability. Her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) is a series of ­self-­portraits in which she depicts herself as an anonymous movie star, a seeming contra­diction in terms that suggests the instability of identity. Novelists including the late W. G. Sebald have used photographs to interrupt and complicate their texts, creating a hybrid form. In Austerlitz (2001), which is punc­tuated by melancholic photographs, Sebald attempts to reconstruct a personal past and a larger history of the Holocaust with a blend of fiction and autobiography.

Reproduced on the cover of Brunet’s book is a 1978 photo by Bernard Faucon titled The Banquet. It’s a meticulously crafted scene of a catastrophic fire staged with ­life-­size and ­life­like mannequins of children, which appear in postures of terror or delight at the flames that threaten to engulf an elaborately set table, though their faces are inscrutable. The photograph has a startling eloquence, and tells a truth that belies its constructedness. This ghastly ­photo-­fiction might be the only way to speak to the unspeakable events of the most photographed century.