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In novels, we sometimes come across photographs printed alongside the text. These photos, unlike those printed on glossy white paper, are often reproduced on poor-quality paper and do not particularly stand out as remarkable works of art. When, one wonders, did literary works that place photographs alongside words begin to be produced?
 
Looking into the history of photography, we find that photographic literature did not emerge immediately in 1839, the year of photography’s invention. In the formative years of photography, numerous attempts were made to incorporate photographs into literary works, but most of those efforts fizzled out. This was because, at the time, photographs had to be printed on glossy paper, incurring enormous costs. For example, between 1853 and 1855, during his exile on the island of Jersey, Victor Hugo planned to create a book combining photographs and text, but it never came to fruition.
 
This situation changed in the 1890s, after the invention of simili-gravure—an inexpensive printing technique that made it possible to reproduce text and photographs on the same page. Using this technology, a series of photographic literary works were published from the fin de siècle into the early twentieth century. Yet the only one still widely read today is Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892). This marks the first major puzzle in the study of photographic literature: why is it that only this work endures, while the rest of those photographic texts vanished?
 
At the time, most photographs inserted into literary works depicted models acting as the characters. Apparently, this was problematic. Rodenbach, by contrast, used postcards of Bruges and deliberately chose only landscape shots that captured as few human figures as possible. Is there something about portrait photography that makes it difficult to reconcile with a verbal art form? And what, exactly, is the nature of that difficulty? Furthermore, when the image evoked by words and the photographic image each complement the other, merging into a single imaginative force, what sort of imaginative space unfolds?
 
With these questions in mind, if we turn to later works of photographic literature, we discover that writers devised a remarkably wide range of methods for using photographs. In André Breton’s Nadja (1928, 1963), there is a collage of four photographs from which only the eyes of the woman called Nadja remain. In Yoshino-Kuzu (1931, 1937), Jun’ichirō Tanizaki included a photograph of a letter supposedly written by the grandmother of one of the fictional characters. Typically, a photograph is thought to depict people and objects “as they actually were.” But in a literary work that unfolds between reality and fiction, it is extremely difficult to show a central character as-is in a photograph. Indeed, it seems that only by deliberately hiding the unseen center or revealing it from a different angle does a photograph come to life.
 
Ultimately, thinking about photographic literature means examining the distinct qualities of images evoked by words and images captured by photographs, and exploring how these two forms of imagery might relate to one another. The image called forth by words does not come with a visually verifiable shape. Yet, when the reader senses that something is being described within those words and continues to pursue that sensation, a definite image arises in the mind. Photographs, by contrast, are purely visual images: the subject appears undeniably right before our eyes. However, in photographic literature, once a photograph becomes deeply intertwined with the world of the text, it starts to seem as though the truth resides precisely in what cannot be seen. What a photograph fails to capture is the immense accumulation of time that has passed since the image was taken—none other than the record of hardship that people have experienced throughout that history.
 
What, then, takes place when these two very different media—words and photographs—are each imbued with vitality? Let’s explore that question carefully by delving into important works of photographic literature.
 

(Written by TSUKAMOTO Masanori, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2025)