| During late twentieth-century France, many authors looked to photography to create new connections between words and images. The corpus of this study comprises Anny Duperey's autobiography with photographs, Le voile noir; Alix Cleo Roubaud's photo diary, Journal 1979--1983 ; Anne-Marie Garat's photographic essay and exposition, Photos de familles; Garat's photocentric novel Chambre noire ; Michel Tournier and Edouard Boubat's photo travel journal, Journal de voyage au Canada; Tournier and Boubat's photographic essay Vues de dos; and Tournier's photocentric novel La goutte d'or. These works contain collaborations and resistances between photographic images and text. In some instances the images are reproductions of actual photographs; in others they are ekphrastic descriptions of imagined photographs.;When texts and photographs meet, they often distort the original that is being represented. Just as there is for the French no innocence associated with the words "collaboration" and "resistance," so there is none with the collaborations and resistances between photographic images and written text. This study analyzes the not-so-innocent translations and distortions that occur between photographs and text, which frequently portray dominant ideologies and cultural codes.;Photographs often reflect an imaginary objectivity, realism, and truthfulness that does not exist; instead, they portray society's idea of objectivity, which is ultimately subjective. This study explores the consequences of perceived objectivity in the reading of photographs and their interactions with text.;In books that contain both photography and text, the reader and the spectator find their roles overlap. I look at the active role that the reader and spectator are asked to play in these works---a role that, it can be argued, is central to the full development of the meanings that are constantly circulating between the two media.;Roland Barthes, Geoffrey Batchen, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Stuart Hall, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Susan Sontag are among the critics who provide useful concepts and theories as a foundation from which to explore encounters between texts and photographs. |
