The Photographer as Autobiographer
Arnaud Schmitt
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (Palgrave Macmillan)
September 2022 294pp
ISBN: 978-3-031-08855-1
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 studies 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.
Table of Contents
1- Introduction (Pages 1-14)
2- The I of the Photographer: A Historical Perspective (Pages 15-64)
3- A Structural Approach to Photographers’ Memoirs (Pages 65-142)
4- A Cognitive Approach to Photographers’ Memoirs (Pages 143-230)
5- Hold Still (Pages 231-270)
6- Conclusion (Pages 271-278)
Arnaud Schmitt is a Full Professor at the University of Bordeaux, France. He has published two books and multiple articles on autofiction and autobiography.