Fiction, or Other Accounts of Photography

This collection of five essays in differing styles (including a fictive interview and a poetic text) and one interview approaches the fictional dimension of the photographic image from various angles, while acknowledging certain characteristic properties such as emptiness and presence, “détournement” or reversal, and reappropriation. In seeking to elucidate some of photography’s devices and the nature of its functioning, some of the authors consider the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha, W. Allen and C. Akerman; others examine its relationship with encyclopedic knowledge and cinema. Other topics addressed include the rapport between photography and the imaginary, the relation between reality and narrative, mimesis, the photo-mirror effect, and certain privative notions (non-visibility, non-presence, inertia, void.) Texts in French and English. Brief biographical notes on the authors.