Considers the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs for three modernist writers
- Offers a comparative study of the motif of reading portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf
- Discusses how portrait photographs prompt feelings of love and gratification as well as feelings of frustration and distress in the beholders
- Discusses the modernists’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of such pictures early in the 20th century
- Reconsiders the modernists’ relation to the visual media and the possibilities for contact, communication, and sympathy early in the twentieth century
- Considers how the increased circulation of portrait photographs transformed human relations and the relation between the private and the public spheres
Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.