Reviewed by: Pour fixer la trace. Photographie, littérature et voyage au milieu du xixe siècle Grant Crichfield Caraion, Marta . Pour fixer la trace. Photographie, littérature et voyage au milieu du xixe siècle. Geneva: Droz ( Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, Vol. 408), 2003. Pp. 391. ISBN 2-600-00839-x. Marta Caraion has written an insightful study of relationships between photography and mid-nineteenth century French texts. Founding her project on publications which include both text and photographs on the same topic, Caraion proposes to approach photography from a literary point of view and to interrogate as well its status as art. The photographic image and literary text present problematic, even conflicted, rapports for the ways in which they purport to represent the referent; therein lies the nexus of Caraion's approach. She points out that photography renders space malleable in that its representation of the referent changes its size, transports it in space, transforms distances. The photograph also alters time by stopping its passage and freezing it in the image. By such qualities, Caraion argues, photography slides from simple reflection of objective reality to a form which accepts viewers' desires to experience heretofore unreachable places or to preserve forever aspects of a person or place in space and time, for example. By its flirtation with the fantastic, the marvelous, the dream, photography assumes a role which is even a counterpoint to the objective reality it seems to claim to represent: it becomes a form one could define rather as fiction – a notion central to her thesis. She argues that, for a text illustrated with photographs, the images which provide realistic visual representations of accompanying textual references can also take on instead an autonomous and properly fictional coherence, and may even ultimately contradict the text. Further, these images, by their privileged connection to empirical reality, can reverse the traditional relationship between text and image and assume hegemony over the text, in effect rendering it rather an illustration of the photographic image. Caraion divides her inquiry into two major parts; the first, entitled, "La photographie, le voyage, le texte," is devoted to an examination of her principal theme's epistemological roots in eighteenth century scientific [End Page 150] and documentary publications, exemplified most notably by the Encyclopédie. Caraion moves on to pursue the relationships of photograph and literary text in fruitful analyses of Rodenbach's Bruges la morte and ekphrasis. Maxime du Camp's Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, the first French book illustrated with photographs, is at once a photographer's album and a writer's text; as such, Caraion views it as the beginning of a new form of printed communication and as primordial for a consideration of the relationships between literary text and photography. In the second part, "Ruines: DuCamp, Feydeau, Gautier," Caraion's discussion of Du Camp's Egypte as well as the painter and archeologist, Auguste Salzmann's Jérusalem is most rewarding. She claims that the two writers have a relationship with photography which one could qualify as naive by their total confidence in the truth and testimonial worth of the new art, even though DuCamp's and Salzmann's final works in fact move beyond this naivete. Incarnating contradictory values innate in photography, for example, romanticism and concern for scientific documentation, DuCamp tries both to capture and record on paper echoes of antiquity and also document the immutable physical and artistic aspects of oriental monuments. Building on her exploration of DuCamp's fascination with ruins, death, and photography, Caraion pursues and problematizes the photographic and textual representation of ruins in a most productive way in the chapter on Salzmann. She interrogates the history of nineteenth century photography to understand whether the literary text responds to a void in the "imaginaire mélancolique du siècle" (270). Caraion avers that ruins present special interest to the photographers in question because they constitute a point of conjuncture for science and dream; past, present, future; Enlightenment and romanticism. Photography enjoys moreover a semiologically complex affinity with ruins – or traces of the past; its effort to capture them (thus her title) creates a trace of a trace, and, as such...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Mar 26, 2009
Yong Li + 2
