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Photographic Text(ure): The Grain and the Dot

Introduction

Laurence Petit and Pascale Tollance

Abstract

State of the art of research in photography, general presentation of the thematic issue and of the individual contributions.

Résumé

Etat de l’art des recherches en photographie, présentation générale du dossier thématique et des articles individuels.

Keywords

Photography, Texture, Grain, Dot.

This project began with a text and image conference on “Points, Dots, Periods” that we co-organized at Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France, in September 2012. Although the scope of the conference extended well beyond photography to address the visual arts in general, as well as literature, philosophy and linguistics, what struck us was the way in which all the papers dealing with photography – by itself or in its interaction with text – while discussing dot-related issues provided in fact a reflection on a question which seems to have received very little attention by critics – that of texture and granularity. Indeed, following the seminal publications on photography theory of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – with such major references as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, W.J.T. Mitchell, Alan Sekula, John Tagg or Victor Burgin, to name but a few1 – the past twenty-five years have seen the publication of a number of fascinating volumes on the relation between photography and texts2, whether considered as two different 1. See Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on

Photography (New York, 1981); Victor Burgin, Thinking Photography (London, 1982); W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology

(1986); Alan Sekula, Photography in Print. Writings from the 1816 to the Present (New York, 1981); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1977); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies

and Histories (London, 1988).

2. See Karen Beckman and Liliane Weissberg, On Writing with Photography (University of Minnesota, 2013); François Brunet, Photography and Literature (London, 2009) ; Marsha Bryant, Photo-Textualities (Cranbury, NJ, 1996); Edouardo Cadava, Words of Light : Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton University Press, 1998); James Elkins, Photography Theory (Routledge, 2007); Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and

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kinds of semiotic systems, or perceived as radicallly different and irreducible to one another, photography being for some critics fundamentally “anti-semiotic”3. Few theorists, however, have actually considered photography in its very materiality and “flesh”, in other words in its “texture” or grain. Likewise, few have commented on the materiality of the written text as “supported”, in the architectural sense, by punctuation signs4. The choice of the term “texture” as the focus of this special issue, and as a term providing a bridge between photography and writing – other than the obvious, and much commented upon, connection implied by photography as “the writing of light”5 – makes perfect sense if we look at the etymology not of the word “photography”, but of the word “text”, which comes from the Latin “textere” (to weave, to make) and “textus” (style or texture of a work, tissue or fabric). To talk about a text, be it verbal or photographic, is therefore also to talk about texture, hence the parenthesis in the title of this issue, “Photographic Text(ure): The Grain and the Dot”, which suggests three levels of meaning: the photographic texture, or grain, of the photograph; the photograph as text, and therefore the photographic text as photographic discourse6; and finally, the photographic text understood as a text including, or “textured by”, photographs, or as a text about photographs and/or photography. As such, this title invites a reflection on the materiality of both media which brings together the grain (or “dots”) of the photograph and the dots or punctuation signs of the verbal text, or the grain of the photograph and variations on the dot (or “point”) – such as Barthes’s notion of “punctum”, the motif of the circle, or the notion of contact point or end point. This approach, however, should not be seen as a return to a purely formalist assessment of photography “according to imposed (modernist) terms” reminiscent of what Rosalind Krauss defines as “photography’s shift from a wider scientific and empirical discourse in the nineteenth century to an aesthetic discourse in the twentieth century” under the influence of members of the museum institution “invested in legitimating photography as an art”7. Even though all the contributions in this volume examine the question of texture as it relates to photography and/or writing either in terms of grain or dot, or both, they do so by adopting a contextualizing approach which seeks to integrate social, cultural and historical elements, while at the same time including elements of a “psychoanalytic semiology” commonly perceived as the legacy of postructuralism8.

Photography and Narrative (University of New Mexico, 2003); Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext (Ashgate,

2011); Jean-Pierre Montier, et al., Littérature et Photographie (Rennes, 2008); W.J.T Mitchell, Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

3. See James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail them (Cambridge, Mass, 1998).

4. See, however, the three French references quoted by Jean-Pierre Montier in his essay: Alain Montandon, Le

point final, Actes du colloque de Ferrand, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences humaines de

Clermont-Ferrand, fascicule 20, 1984; Isabelle Serça, Esthétique de la ponctuation (Paris, Gallimard, 2012); Peter Szendy,

A coups de points. La ponctuation comme expérience (Paris, Minuit, 2013); as well as La Ponctuation, Poitiers : La Licorne, 52, 2000

5. See, for instance, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (Paris, 1981); Edouardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, 1998); or more recently, François Brunet, Photography and Literature (London, 2009):7, 143.

6. See, for instance, Victor Burgin’s discussion of the “complex textuality of the photograph” in Thinking

Photography (London, 1982): 144.

7. See Rosalind Krauss, “Photography as a Discursive Space”, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other

Modernists Myths (Cambride, Mass: 1986), cited in James Elkins, Photography Theory (Routledge, 2007).

8. See Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble, Phototextualities. Intersections of Photography and Narrative (University of New Mexico, 2003): f15.

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If we therefore assume that the photographic grain and the textual dot (be it literal or metaphorical) function in a way which is similar to the “grain of the voice” for Barthes, that is to say as the vehicles of a production of meaning which Barthes calls “signifiance”9, what the six contributions of this volume highlight if that this “signifiance” is strongly related to the notions of temporality and desire.

Both Anne-Laure Fortin, in her study of the photographic grain as “punctum” in Sebald’s

Austerlitz, and Jean-Pierre Montier in his essay on the narrative’s “end point” (“point final” in French)

as final textual grain in Jean Ricardou’s novel L’observatoire de Cannes, insist on the temporal value of both the photographic grain and the linguistic full stop or period. If for Montier, the “point final” in a novel signals not just the end, the denouement or the acme of the narrative, but also the end of its own internal and fabricated temporality, the photographic grain of Sebald’s photographs is also a marker of temporality which signals the passing of time, conjures up the physical presence of the past, and, as Fortin aptly puts it, “[lures] us into thinking that the photograph is made of the texture of time10 itself.”

The introspective quality of the photographic grain in Sebald’s Austerlitz, as well as its “effect of truth” is, according to the author, what creates the conditions for an anamnetic narrative in which the traumatic past, hovering like a ghost, suddenly resurfaces through epiphanic moments which constitute the literary event of Sebald’s text. Karen Jacobs’s essay on Teju Cole’s photographic “afterimages”, which precisely examines how Sebald’s œuvre “textures” Cole’s novel Open City through its photographic documentation and biographical accounts of traumatic displacements – the African diaspora for Cole, the Jewish diaspora for Sebald –, also insists on the haunting quality of photographs, but in a radically opposite way. Indeed, where, in Fortin’s essay, the photographic grain as “punctum”, in the Barthesian sense, creates a subjective “sting” that “reveals” the past to the narrator, the general aporia of Cole’s novel with its absence of photographs and narrative elisions point to the impossibility of representing traumatic dislocation, thus creating what Jacobs calls a “negative pictography”. By contrast, the photographs – or the absence thereof – in Nancy Pedri’s and Anne Reynes’s respective objects of study are not so much pointers to a traumatic past which might or might not be retrieved through the action of either actual photographic grain, in the case of Sebald, or metaphorical “vestigial grain”, in the case of Cole, but photographs which convey a sense of temporality deeply rooted in the present. While Anne Reynes, in her essay on Claude Cahun’s illustrations of Lisa Deharme’s collection of poems Le

Cœur de Pic, emphasizes the primacy of the temporal dimension in surrealist thinking which turns the

reader into an active “producer” and “collaborator” of the surrealist object, thereby giving him or her a “creative” knowledge of the object, Nancy Pedri shows how empty photographic frames in the fiction of Williamson, Ondaatje, or Berger and Mohr place the emphasis not so much on the “Ça a été” of photographs, as Barthes puts it, but on their present realization and visualization by a reader/viewer who is invited to “fill in the dots” of the empty frame and supplement the missing narrative.

9. See Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”, in Image-Music-Text (1977): “The ‘grain’ is that : the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue ; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance.” (182); “The ‘grain’ of the voice is not – is not merely – its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message).” (185).

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This need for creative or imaginative supplementarity, which we encounter both in surrealist thinking (Reynes) and in postmodern novels concerned with the limits of representation (Pedri and Jacobs), highlights the fact that beyond issues of temporality, what is at stake is the intimate connection between photographic texture and the question of desire. Both Roland Barthes’s famous phrase “[a photograph] is a message without a code”11 and Rosalind Krauss’s similar contention that photographs are “empty signs”12 emphasize the significant role played by the reader/viewer in assigning a function, value or effect to an inherently blank photographic text. The empty photographic frames examined by Nancy Pedri take this idea even further by becoming “possible plots, likely scenarios, blurred images” left wide open for imaginary speculation, while the absent photographs of Cole’s text challenge the reader “to read the silences, omissions, erasures and absences” created by the author in what Jacobs describes as an “unspoken acknowledgement of representational impossibility”. What ensues is a circulation of desire between reader, author, and text in which the photograph, just like the surrealist object defined by André Breton, “laisse à désirer”, “leaves something to be desired”, that is to say is characterized both by some kind of lack (be it in its direct referentiality or indexicality, or in its more fundamental opacity and instability) and by its capacity to activate desire. This desire can take on various forms : Mathilde Arrivé, in her discussion of the role of American Pictorialism in re-shaping vision and representation at the end of the 19th century through the motif of the circle (those small, circular objects which she calls “meta-photographic ‘points’”), describes the “mechanics” of this activation and circulation of desire by showing how these objects, by calling attention to pictorial artifice, “dramatize vision”, invert scopic roles between onlooker and looked upon, and shatter the myth of photographic transparency through all kinds of screening strategies. For Anne-Laure Fortin, however, what governs the way desire is associated with photographic texture must be described in terms closer to the tactile than to the scopic . The author explains how the “sensual appearance” of the photographic grain in Sebald’s novel is what directly causes “the circulation of emotions, affects and desires”, thus making the photograph act as a “punctum” which “touches” both the narrator and the reader. In her book entitled Tina Modotti. Image,

Texture, Photography, Andrea Noble, following a minute description of Tina Modotti’s photograph Hands Resting on Tool,13 relates the photographer’s play with texture to Claude Gandelman’s definition of the “haptic gaze” as precisely conjuring up the possibility of “touching with the eye”14. As Gandelman puts it, the haptic gaze “penetrates in depth, finding its pleasure in texture and grain”15. Through this explicitly sexual metaphor, the photographic grain as a source of desire becomes a source of pleasure, of erotic pleasure, an idea which is at the core of Jean-Pierre Montier’s discussion of Jean Ricardou’s novel L’Observatoire de Cannes. Montier’s argument is that the final full-stop or period in this text is a figure of the photographic grain, the smallest photographic element, in an erotic photo-literary (New) novel in which reading pleasures, writing pleasures, viewing pleasures and carnal pleasures all become subsumed at the end following a reading process itself seen as a disrobing, and reminiscent of Barthes’s 11. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message”, in Image-Music-Text. (NY: Hill and Wang, 1977): 17.

12. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious. (MIT Press, 1994) :23.

13. Andrea Noble, Tina Modotti. Image, Texture, Photography (University of Mexico Press, 2000): 70.

14. Claude Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1991):5. Quoted in Andrea Noble, Tina Modotti. Image, Texture, Photography. (University of Mexico Press, 2000): 70.

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famous account of reading in The Pleasure of the Text16. Through a complex isotopy of the grain which

is alternately a grain of sand, the grain of the skin, the grain of photography, and the grain of paper, but also the figuration of a black hole, an abyss, a female vagina, a mortal wound, or the Absolute Origin, Ricardou blurs aesthetic categories, reshuffles the relation between the visible, the legible and the scriptible, and underlines the erotic dimension of reading, viewing and writing. With the final image of the fusion and disappearance of all the above-cited types of grain, hole and point, marking thereby the disappearance of the conditions of visibility of the novel, Ricardou also, and above all, poses the problem of all representation, be it verbal or visual.

Terribly eloquent and yet fundamentally silent, pointing but no less poignant, connected to the past and yet unable to retrieve it, bearers of desires that can never be satisfied, the photographic grain and the textual dot, literal or metaphorical, resist interpretation despite the “excess of presence” (Reynes) of their material tactility, and can only offer their flat surface to the illusory promise of depth. Elusive “points” in which all meaning dissolves, they are mostly, as Mathilde Arrivé suggests, “meta-iconic markers” through which the photograph designates itself, highlighting the tension between the reality of its graphic presence and the unreality, or surreality, of its referent. As such, both the grain and the dot seem to function mainly as metaphotographic or metatextual “apparatus” of a “photo-textuality concerned primarily with the exploration of its own structures and practices” (Brunet 11). One might then wonder if, as an “ocular apparatus” designed to “exorbitate” photography, as Régis Durand puts it (Arrivé), an “apparatus of visibility” for Jean Ricardou (Montier), or a “Deleuzian apparatus” of productivity and power (Fortin), photographic texture does not elicit a shift from what Derrida calls a “metaphysics of presence” to what François Brunet calls a “pragmatics of photographic absence from the world” (Brunet 150).

Laurence Petit is Associate Professor of English at Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France. She has published many articles on the relation between literature and the visual arts in contemporary British and American fiction. She has co-edited Picturing the Language of Images (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), as well as a special issue of Word and Image entitled “Musing in the Museum” (Jan-March 2014). She is co-editor of several forthcoming volumes on text and image. She is the translator of Poetics of the

Iconotext, by French Professor Liliane Louvel (Ashgate, 2011).

Email laurence.petit@univ-montp3.fr

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Pascale Tollance is Professor of English at Université Lumière–Lyon 2, France. She has written extensively on British/Canadian author Malcolm Lowry, as well as on British contemporary authors such as Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Rachel Seiffert. Her research has been devoted for a large part to questions involving intertextuality and intermediality. Her book on Graham Swift (Graham Swift. La Scène de la voix. Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011) focuses more specifically on the play between voice and gaze in the fictional text.

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