Picture This!
Symposium on Photography and Narrative in Contemporary
Literature
Free. Public invited.
In 1837, when Joseph Nicéphore
Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
invented a process called daguerreotype, little could
they know of the flood of photographic images that would
follow. Early photographs were unable to capture movement,
but they could offer documentary evidence of persons
or objects, or rival an older artistic medium, painting.
In recent years, photography has stepped
up its competition not only with the painted image,
but also with the written word. Novelists like W.G.
Sebald and Orhan Pamuk include photographs in their
work, interspersing their words with images. What is
the function of these photographs? How do they change
the literary text? And how do we read them?
Presented by the Penn Humanities Forum,
Departments of German, English, Romance Languages, and
History of Art, and Program in Comparative Literature
and Literary Theory.
Image credit: Sebald,
W.G., Austerlitz: Munich: Carl
Hanser Verlag 2001:272.
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