Arnaud Schmitt - The Photographer as Autobiographer

Arnaud Schmitt

The Photographer as Autobiographer

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Words and pictures. They seem to get on well with each other in a society increasingly defined by its multimedia digital way of communicating. They are commonly combined in social media, for instance, which, for the most part, mix, seemingly indiscriminately, pictures (animated or not) and (often minimalist) words. Not only multimediality now plays a predominant role in the way any form of communication flows through social, cultural, and even political spaces, but most humanities scholars will have noticed how it has become a high-profile research topic, and the fact of mentioning it in an application for research funding certainly does not harm your chances to be successful in your application. Apart from a natural and ancestral appetency for novelty, this recent fad for multimedia practices can be accounted for by the fact that, in the last decades, barriers strictly separating various media fell and allowed for more daring artistic experiments. The graphic novel, for instance, a new term allowing comics to find a way into academia, has always been at the forefront of multimediabimedia to be specificinnovation, whether more on the visual side ( Chris Ware ) or on the textual one (Brian Selznick), proposing new ways of communicating with the reader through words and pictures in a less stereotyped manner than more traditional comics in which text is often kept separated in phylacteries. Obviously, associating words and pictures only work up to a certain point. Indeed, if mixing implies, as any dictionary specifies, to combine or put together to form one substance or mass, then unless one considers a graphic novel to be this substance, bimediality does not really give way to a new language. As a matter of fact, as innovative as it is, Wares Building Stories for instance still segregates text and images simply because there is no way these two drastically different means of experiencing and processing the world can merge. They operate in different places in your brain and produce different affects and percepts. The best any author can hope for is to find new and stimulating ways of combining both and setting up a dialogue between them to enlarge the artistic scope of the work. As we will see in Chap. , there might even be a hierarchy among senses when it comes to meaning-making. To make matters more complicated, reading a text may involve two senses as one can read aloud in ones mind and reading a text and looking at a picture both involve sight, but also different semantic patterns. Finally, even though as mentioned above a text and a picture trigger off different types of cognitive information, this information is not so easily spatially categorized in the brain: The brain network that analyzes word meaning is quite distinct from that which converts letters into sound. Semantics mobilizes a widespread array of regions []. Crucially, not one of them is exclusive to the written word. Rather, they all activate as soon as we think about concepts conveyed by spoken words or even images (Dehaene: 109). Even checking a new post on Instagram, briefly scanning the (domineering) picture