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Abstract
Photo-texts? Searching for a tool of analysis of contemporary documentary photography
A term "photo-text" emphasizes a contemporary change in visual culture researches, where photography is a link between a photographed object and its cultural meaning. In a book titled “Phototextuality” Andrea Noble and Alex Hughes stated that phototextuality plays “between the culturally fabricated nature of photographic artifact and its fundamental indexality, that is, its status as a trace of the real; and evidential manifestation of what has been”. Photo-texts characterised by critical, self-reflective and intertextual attitude towards culture go together with contemporary interests with narration, memory and history. The text is divided into few parts. I consider a status of phototextuality in the first one and present basic researches on textuality of photography in the second. I compare Roland Barthes’s analysis to a John Berger’s and Jean Mohr’s project there. Part three is dedicated to visual studies, where phototextuality is a field of discussion with models of art and popular culture (on an example of Gregor Brandler work). Finally, in the fourth part a critical attitude of photo-texts towards history is presented. In conclusion, photo-texts are regarded as an effective tool of contemporary culture analysis, both on the level of its production and on “reading” level. This reading is not a “free” or “mis” -reading, that tears the meanings off the objects of reference, but rather which “anchorages” those meanings in represented object.
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