Photo-Textes: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image

In today’s image-saturated society, photograph and text live side-by-side, engaged in a complex collaboration. Andy Stafford critically examines this interplay in Photo-texts, taking nine case studies from the 1990s French-speaking world and looking at the interaction between non-fictional written texts (caption, essay, fragment, poem) and photographic images. The “photo-text,” as he defines it, is concerned as much with the oral as it is with visual and written culture. That text-image collaborations give space to the spoken, spectral traces of spoken human discourse suggests that the key element of the photo-text is its radical provisionality—that it is inherently unstable and ever-changing. This pathbreaking study offers a vital resource for scholars in contemporary French and francophone cultures.