Roman 1900 et photographie (les éditions Nilsson/ Per Lamm et Offertstadt Frères)

Abstract

Over sixty photographically-illustrated novels were printed over a period of ten years either side of 1900 by two publishers capitalising on the ease and economy of half-tone reproduction. Many writers interviewed at the time spoke out against this intrusion of the « documentary » and the « anti-artistic » in the novel (survey carried out by A. Ibels for Le Mercure de France, 1898), and few collaborators were able successfully to integrate the images into their texts. Yet Jean Lorrain, in La Dame turque, drew on their perceivably melancholy nature, equating them with the mental images of an idealised women in the mind of his hero. And in Willy's En bombe, the author himself posed in a self-consciously voyeuristic novel that satirises the typical Nilsson reader. Taken as a whole, these semi-pornographic fictions, which arrived on the market at a period when women « increasingly failfed] to marry » (H. James), are a witness to a failure both to seriously address women 's emancipation, and to conceive of photography as a work of pure imagination. Bibliography.