by Jon Lackman | 3 December 2010 | Photography
In a recent issue of History of Photography (August 2010), Jan Baetens reviews Photography and Literature by François Brunet:
An Americanist in Paris, François Brunet combines the best of both worlds. It is indeed extremely rare to discover a book that has such a profound knowledge of the Continental as well as the Anglo-Saxon traditions and history … There exist quite a number of excellent publications on literature and photography … yet the approach defended by François Brunet innovates the field dramatically. First of all, he argues [against the idea that] literature defined the stakes of photography … [Here] it is photography that appears as a dominating medium …
A second important innovation [is] put forward … [T]he relationship between two media tends to be reduced to the linear interaction between specific ‘sources’ and ‘targets’ … [Brunet] attempts to evaluate the shifting relationships between media at the level of social meanings attributed to each medium …
A third methodological dimension of Brunet’s approach is an attractive variation on the notion of photography’s expanded field … Brunet’s definition of what a ‘discourse’ is exceeds by all means the set of titles, captions, critical comments and other accompanying texts that may surround or come with the photograph itself. What he discloses is the fact that photography is sometimes less a visual object than the object of a social and critical discussion that takes it as its pretext.
