Photo-Graphemicality

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank professor Adam Dziadek for the project supervision and all help in writing this book. I would also like to thank prof. Jan Piotrowiak, prof. Anna Łebkowska and prof. Agata Stankowska. I am very grateful for the help of the project team coordinator, Anna Dziadek, MA. I wholeheartedly thank all those without whom this book would never have been created: my family and friends.

Introduction

… at the end of twentieth century, writing often self-qualifies through a parallel with a recorded image (whether it be photographic or filmic image). This bringing together is a way in which writing defines itself but also searches for itself.¹

Danièle Méaux

In the afterword to Światłem pisane [Written by Light], the anthology of Polish poetry inspired by photography, the editors offer the following diagnosis: “Associating two fields of art is risky and requires intuition, but it also allows us to see cultural phenomena in a new perspective.”² Despite these difficulties, Marta Koszowy adds,³ contemporary literature is more than willing to combine these two media. These connections are not limited to the literary exploitation of metaphors and motifs connected with the photographic view of reality, but they also allow for going beyond them in the gesture of interpreting the photographic way of “seeing” the world. If we are to accept the theses of Danièle Méaux (and the earlier thought of Philipp Hamon, which Méaux developed⁴), the context of the visual arts in late twentieth and early twenty-first century literature becomes almost inalienable. Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen emphasize: “In simcult, the responsible writer must be an imagologist… To be effective, writing must become imagoscription that is available to everyone.”⁵ Contemporary Polish poets seem to be aware of this dependence, and see photography as a rightful partner of literature.

The techniques of photographic recording of reality were born relatively late, namely at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Still, the reflection on the ←9 | 10→relations between this type of image and literature is deeply immersed in the issues raised much earlier in theoretical literary studies. The relationship between the way texts and visual arts function is one of the most interesting issues in literary studies. Indeed, it is bequeathed by a great historical tradition, since already the ancient Greeks considered this problem, while one of the most important philological disputes has been the debate on visual representation depicted in (but also aroused by) eighteenth-century Laocoön by Lessing, who reinterprets the principle of “kinship” between painting and literature, reaching far beyond the problem of poetic description and releasing poetry – as Michał Mencfel observes – from “the obligation of describing the outer layer of reality” 6. Moreover, a special contribution to the contemporary study of the relation between literature and visual arts were works created in the semiotic perspective – e.g. by Yuri Lotman, Umberto Eco, or Roland Barthes, and in Poland by Seweryna Wysłouch, Michał Rusinek, or Adam Dziadek – which made it possible to confront literature with the mode of expression characteristic of non-verbal codes. Cultural criticism and new comparative studies provided yet another perspective, and in terms of photography studies, a particularly interesting tool was the study of visual arts, which drew on anthropological knowledge.

Although studies of the relations between literature and art have generally focused on painting techniques, photography naturally became an object of interest for both theoreticians and artists themselves – a medium which had already fascinated Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The relation between Polish literature and photography was obviously an issue raised in philological works. I am thinking here mainly of studies by Anna Łebkowska, Cezary Zalewski, Marta Koszowy, and Sławomir Sikora. These analyses referred mainly to the narrative or mediative value of this medium, stressing such typically Barthesian issues as the relations between photography and human memory or the “mortality” of the image record. In this book, I intend to extend this optics a bit, stressing also technical aspects of photographic seeing and the way to transfer them onto the literary plane. I present this medium as art based on binary oppositions, such as: light and darkness, truth and falsehood, movement and immobility, presence and absence, positive and negative. Furthermore, the space of photographic dualisms includes such issues as the dispute about the “truthfulness” of a given image or the transformations brought about by the technological breakthrough after the introduction of digital techniques. ←10 | 11→This problem still seems to be insufficiently recognized in theoretical works – especially those dealing with the relation between photography and literature – yet it is clearly present in literature.

My research focuses on Polish poetic works published after 1989, with particular emphasis on texts by authors born in the 1960s and 1970s. In this book, I analyze and interpret poems of such authors as Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało, Marcin Świetlicki, Jacek Dehnel, Julia Fiedorczuk, Marcin Sendecki, Darek Foks, Justyna Bargielska, and Bronka Nowicka. In my readings, I often refer to contexts characteristic of an older generation of authors who published after 1989, i.e. Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Ewa Lipska, and others. Finally, I also deal with foreign poets, especially those originating from the New York School, British or Irish authors whose influence on Polish poetry has perhaps been most fully documented. Texts by authors such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, or – to a lesser extent – Seamus Heaney seem to derive from similar desires as the poems of Polish poets born in the 1970s. As Przemysław Owczarek notes: “For O’Hara, particular fields of inspiration are gesture painting and film, i.e. forms whose dynamics corresponds strongly with the constant movement that constitutes urban everyday life.”7 Both a strong immersion in the experience of everyday life and the clear influence of visual arts are features inherent in the newest Polish poetry.⁸ It is in this work that we seem to most clearly see the so-called “digital breakthrough,” which we are dealing with both in technology and broadly understood culture.

In his text on researching images functioning on the Internet, Rafał Drozdowski notes:

However, the “interferences” – to employ Adam Dziadek’s term – between literature and the visual medium visible in the texts of the above-mentioned poets ←11 | 12→are of a diverse character. They are not limited to directly expressed references – including those that have the features of ekphrasis10 – or the use of specific metaphors that refer to photographic notions – connected, for example, with the way an image is framed or the light sensitivity of the material used. Moreover, they reach beyond “what is visible in the picture,” showing photographic processes and techniques of image acquisition. Works highlighting formal and stylistic similarities between literary and photographic works also occupy an important place. In this perspective, image recording becomes both a theme – as, for example, in the case of the texts in Jacek Dehnel’s “Brzytwa okamgnienia” [A Razor-sharp Glance] – and a method of constructing poetic works. In this context, the approach I propose comes close to the research conducted by Magdalena Szczypiorska-Mutor, who in the monograph Praktyki fotograficzne i teksty kultury. Inwersja, metamorfoza, montaż considers photography to be “not only a complex of motifs and problems related to the photograph but also a set of practices and technical processes of significant, though less present in the research reflection, aesthetic, philosophical, interpretative and semantic potential.”¹¹

In his introduction to the collection Kulturowe wizualizacje doświadczenia, Adam Dziadek points out that Barthes’s view of the problem of the visuality of literature makes adopt the following methodological position:

Although in this book I go beyond the notion of visuality, focusing on other types of photographic references as well, I find it appealing to make use of Dziadek’s optics. After all, tracking down the “interference” between literature ←12 | 13→and photography requires a careful analysis of the very manner of this “structuring.” This process would involve not only strictly pictorial, direct references to photography (including e.g. photographic metaphors or references to photographic images13) but also similarities contained in the very construction of literary texts. I propose a similar way of reading: beginning from structured ordering, I proceed to exploring the space of hermeneutic interpretation.

In my research, I treat literature and photography as two adjacent ways of recording; using different means of expression, but drawing from the same desire – the desire to record the reality found. This way of seeing requires the use of specific tools. Hence my proposal to use the terms “photo-graphemicality” and “photo-grapheme.”¹⁴ I understand “photo-graphemicality” as a set of features indicating the kinship between text and photography on its various levels – both formal and content one. In order to concretize the way this concept functions in individual works, I use the term “photo–grapheme” defined as the basic unit in which the entanglement linking the text and this medium is revealed. Photo-graphemes can be of various character. They range from directly expressed references to specific images (e.g. to old photographs in Jacek Dehnel’s poems) or techniques (e.g. in Justyna Bargielska), through the use of specific metaphors connected with such concepts as exposure time or depth of field (e.g. in Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało), to the translation of these factors into poetic texts (e.g. the reflection of the zoom principle in Marcin Świetlicki’s “Camera Obscura” or the play with the sound layer in his another poem, “Burzenie”).

Both these notions – “photo-grapheme” and “photo-graphemicality” –created by analogy with Derridian “grammatological” categories, put emphasis on the signifying quality and “writingness” of the photographic capturing of the image. Emphasizing those features allows us to stress the common “origin” of writing and the photographic image, and to show the parallels between those ways of recording – especially in the context of changes related to technological progress. Both in the case of the digital and analog image, the proposed notions allow us to define formal and stylistic similarities between photography and literature. Such an approach makes it possible to combine the understanding of photography as a cultural artifact – situated on the side of fine arts, but also bearing traces ←13 | 14→of strictly utilitarian activities – notions and activities related to photographic techniques and – finally – the process of perception of a photographic image.

“For 100 years, photography has been submerged in the ‘developing fluid’ of literature and came out inverse: not as a witness of the real but as a witness of the imagined,”15 wrote Paul Edwards. In this approach, the two adjacent media – literature and photography – are something of two opposite mirrors. The “images” they contain are deformed to a certain extent, but at the same time they become “tools” used for the creation of poetic worlds and for highlighting their connection with non-textual reality. This book attempts to show the complexity of these relations

Chapter One: Between Poetry and Photography¹

In one of Marcin Świetlicki’s volumes, we may find the following poem: