This book explores hybrid memoirs, combining text and images, authored by photographers. It contextualizes this sub-category of life writing from a historical perspective within the overall context of life writing, before taking a structural and cognitive approach to the text/image relationship. While autobiographers use photographs primarily for their illustrative or referential function, photographers have a much more complex interaction with pictures in their autobiographical accounts. This book explores how the visual aspect of a memoir may drastically alter the reader’s response to the work, but also how, in other cases, the visual parts seem disconnected from the text or underused.
Author(s): Arnaud Schmitt
Series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 300
City: Cham
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The I of the Photographer: A Historical Perspective
The Pencil of Nature’s Hybridity
Photography and Literature After The Pencil of Nature
Photographs in Autobiography
Photographers and Autobiography
Photographs as Countertext
Chapter 3: A Structural Approach to Photographers’ Memoirs
Balance: Space and Time
The Power Struggle
Structural Stakes
Structure: Two Filiations
The Traditional Book Format
The Photobooks
Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (1989)
Bill Hayward, Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs (2015)
Annie Leibovitz, A Photographer’s Life: 1990–2005 (2006)
Joanne Leonard, Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008)
Tony Mendoza, Pictures with Stories: A Memoir by Tony Mendoza (2017)
Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alvin Langdon Coburn Photographer: An Autobiography (1966)
Gemma Levine, Just One More… (2014)
Beaumont Newhall, Memoirs of a Life in Photograph (1993)
Conclusion
Chapter 4: A Cognitive Approach to Photographers’ Memoirs
The Cognition of Hybridity
Hierarchy Between Senses and Media
Text–Image Integration Strategies
Theory of the Graphic Novel
Illustration and Subordination
The Deictic Referential Logic
Case Studies
Chapter 5: Hold Still
Hold Still’s Multimedia Balance
Directionality in Hold Still
Deictic Referentiality
Quasi-Deictic Referentiality
Forms of Indirect Referentiality
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Works Cited
Primary Corpus
Theoretical Sources
General sources
Photography & Autobiography: Photography & Literature
The Theory & Philosophy of Photography
The Theory and Cognition of Hybridity
Works of Fiction or Non-Fiction
Book Reviews
Index
