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Editorial: Special Issue on Photography and Literature

Photography’s active relationship to the word, to writing, and to literature is widely recognized as being as old as photography itself. As recent scholarship shows, in Niepce’s earnest search for a name for the technique he had invented or in Fox Talbot’s puzzling over the first images that his technique produced, the enigmatic nature of the photograph was immediately engaged by thought and language (Batchen). Following the convergence of the chemical photograph and the printing press, the photograph became ever more intimate with the printed word and its cultural forms: the book, the document, the newspaper, the diary. With their varied purposes, the advertising copywriter, the journalist, the lawyer, the archivist, the compiler of the domestic album, not to mention the surrealist or the conceptual artist, came to grapple and play with the relationship of image and text. In the West, the relationship of the photograph and literature can be seen as a modern phase of a much longer history. A history that would include, for instance, the classical literary genre of ekphrasis, a branch of rhetoric dedicated to the special problems of writing about pictures and visual experience, or Alberti’s advice, in De Pittura, urging painters to conceive of their images as “istoria”; spatial compositions in which surfaces, members, and bodies were to be organized as if analogous to the phrases, sentences, and passages of literary narratives. The relationships of photographic images to texts and language are ongoing and changing. In our current context, new vernacular forms such as the (photo)blog emerge, the image is produced, distributed, and exchanged with a speed and immediacy so as to be likened to a kind of speech (Rubinstein and Sluis). The digital or digitized photograph has become the semantic unit of the web, working in interactive ways with text, the written and the spoken word, the font, and other graphic and animated elements. The digital image is born with metadata, it carries its own linguistic supplement which facilitates connections, ensembles, and classifications across universes of images. In its first three volumes Photographies has dealt with some of these developments and intends to do so again in future issues. This issue departs from the “flickering signifier” of the digital image (Hayles 30), the image refreshed many times per second on the computer screen, and the fragile informational patterns in which form the networked photographic image is encoded, distributed, and displayed. This issue takes ‘Photography and Literature’ as its theme and the photographs considered by the contributors mainly belong to what has recently been conceived as an “analogue” era. The literary texts that they think about are novels and stories. They deal with forms of inscription: the physically and chemically inscribed photograph and the printed artefact, bound books of the 19th and 20th centuries produced by the thud and impress of the typewriter key and the printer’s plate. These are more than technical differences in any narrow sense. In much the same way that the