10. Nesting – Braiding – Weaving: Photographic Interventions in Three Contemporary American Novels

Abstract

While photography has played an important role in fiction since the moment of invention of the new visual medium in 1839, it is only since the late 1990s that we can speak of the widespread presence of photographic images in fictional narratives. By virtue of being regarded as bearers of the imprint of the real, photographs are inevitably in friction with the fictional, especially if they are explicitly (that is, graphically) displayed rather than implicitly (verbally only) represented. Focusing on the first (explicit) mode of photographic presence, the essay examines the different ways of embedding photographs in narrative. It suggests three broad categories of nesting, braiding, and weaving to indicate how the processes of reading and meaning-making are orchestrated by the manner in which photographic images are inserted into fictional narratives.