Abstract
This study investigates what the processes of reading photographic images and literary texts share in common. A number of seminal theoretical texts published since the 1960s are used to examine the problematic from three different angles: authority, social convention, and narrativity. These texts by theorists like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Iser or Stanley Fish are confronted with artistic works and with each other, and thereby help to renegotiate persistent problems in traditional epistemological distinctions between media like the sequential text and the still image. The primary sources are Julio Cortazar's short story ‘Las babas del diablo' (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's film 'Blowup' (1966), James Agee's and Walker Evans' 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' (1941), as well as artistic photographs by Duane Michals, Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman.
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