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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.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The I of the Photographer: A Historical Perspective.- Chapter 3: A Structural Approach to Photographers' Memoirs.- Chapter 4: A Cognitive Approach to Photographers' Memoirs.- Chapter 5: Hold Still.- Chapter 6: Conclusion.
About the author
Arnaud Schmitt is a Full Professor at the University of Bordeaux, France. He has published two books and multiple articles on autofiction and autobiography.
Report
"To me, that's what makes autobiographies by photographers interesting: not their faith in photography but their suspicion of it, and the transfer of their suspicion of photography's representation onto autobiography's representation." (Charles Reeve, Biography, Vol. 46 (2), 2023)
"This book's exploration of how literary life writing and artistically composed, strategically positioned images combine to intensify the representation and impact of photographers' life stories is a timely intervention into this captivating hybrid genre, and a valuable contribution to life writing studies ... . Schmitt's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary insights, which collectively initiate critical discussions on the diversity and complexity of interchanges among memoirist, text, visual image, and reader, constitute a firm platform for more specialised analyses of creatively illustrated life narratives." (Merril Howie, Life Writing, June 19, 2023)
