The Eloquent Picture

Barbara Burns talks to Andy Stafford, whose book Photo-texts From Below: Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins has just been published in Legenda’s Visual Culture series.

BB. Your new Legenda volume focuses on a form of political art which combines photographic images with written text to express solidarity with people who are oppressed or excluded or silenced. For those of us not working in this field, can you give an overview of the increasing significance of photo-texts in recent decades? What are the key themes these works address, and why is the perspective ‘from below’ crucial here?

AS. It is not just the internet age that has galvanised the photo-text in the 25 years of this new century. Indeed, written text alongside photography has existed at least since the First World War, particularly in the politicised work of the Dadaists such as Hannah Höch’s photomontage and, most famously, the anti-Hitler work of John Heartfield and then the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Since 1991, and especially 9/11, the world has become not only more dangerous and unstable (wars, pandemics, economic crises and climate catastrophe), but more brutal. You have only to look at the degrading treatment of refugees fleeing war and economic turmoil to see that we have entered a ‘New Age of Catastrophe’. In that sense, the photo-text has tried to respond to these human global challenges.

What photography can do, especially accompanied by text, is give voice to those who are the victims of this new age, the millions and minions who never get to speak out or are never listened to. This is the ‘from below’ optic adopted by the book. It builds on the work of Raphael Samuel whose ‘history from below’ challenges ‘official’ (read: ‘bourgeois’) history; and, in photography, takes its cue from the American radical photographer Allan Sekula who pointed, at the same time, to the dangers of photography from below especially in the way that it is used by Officialdom; text alongside photography ‘from below’ then becomes a space for reclaiming images for the silenced and marginalised. This obviously begs the question as to what photography – and the photo-text – ‘from above’ looks like: I don’t set out to answer this huge question.

BB. The theme of spectrality is central to your study, and the cover image is a striking case in point, taken from Chloe Dewe Mathews’s work Shot at Dawn. It shows a rural location in France where a group of soldiers were executed for desertion or cowardice. Their names are listed under the photograph, which was taken in 2014, one hundred years after the event. There is a ghostly quality to this photo-text commemorating nine men who were written out of history at the decision of those in authority. What motivated you to choose it for the cover, and in what ways does spectrality become a motif permeating the chapters of your book?

AS. Spectrality – or ‘absent presence’ – reflects this situation in which the victims are ever present but perfectly absent from the media, whether in France, the UK or anywhere in the rich, developed world. But spectrality is also, at the same time, a photo-textual tactic. For example, the first chapter of my book looks at prison life in France (which has the highest prison population in Europe) but concentrates on a photo-textual artist, Mohamed Bourouissa, who steadfastly avoids showing a ‘clear’ picture of prison experience; firstly, because photography in prison, unless sanctioned by the French state, is illegal: how does that guarantee ‘objectivity’ if the state controls all prison photography? And secondly, any representation of prisoners in the media inevitably stereotypes their experience.

Bourouissa’s work – as we can see below – involves deliberately blurred and fuzzy versions of the images sent from prison by his friend ‘Al’ alongside text messages sent on the prisoner’s mobile phone that show the understandable breakdowns in communication between the ‘inside’ and the world outside prison. Here, the photo-text uses spectrality as a deliberate form of opacity: we never get to see ‘portraits’ of the inmates, merely garish prison corridors, wire fences, and empty fridges, all accompanied – as below this photograph – by enigmatic text messages from Al.

BB. In your chapter entitled ‘Migration’, you include analysis of photo-texts depicting the experience of the so-called ‘brûleurs’ or ‘burners’, refugees escaping from Africa to Europe. What does this name signify, and how are their stories represented?

AS. For someone like me working in French studies, and especially Francophone studies, and who is interested in the notion of cultural identity, the story of the ‘burners’ in Morocco was a wake-up call. In order to get to Europe and be able to stay, the ‘harragas’ (Arabic for ‘burners’), who have left their villages and towns across Africa, ‘hide’ their country of origin from the European authorities by burning their identity papers (and even their fingerprints): they believe that they cannot be expelled if their country of origin is hidden. Not only a form of opacity, this tactic is also a desperate abandonment of the refugees’ cultural origins.

The Belgian photographer Thomas Chable followed the ‘burners’ from sub-Saharan Africa across the Sahara to Morocco; he too (as we can see below) uses their spectral presence/absence in his photography to convey the experience of clandestine migration; then, alongside the spectral photography, the Algerian writer Aziz Chouaki narrates a story of a refugee who tries to hide in a boat in Tangiers.

BB. It’s unsurprising that the COVID-19 pandemic features as part of your analysis. What insights into the reality of the care sector do the photo-texts of this period afford?

AS. What was noticeable about the COVID-19 pandemic was the media silence on the care workers who laid down their lives in the hospitals and intensive care units to look after the infected. Again, as in French prisons (but for different reasons), photography in hospitals was extremely limited during the first lockdown of 2020; and although we all banged our pots and pans in support of the nurses, doctors and cleaners who kept the crucial medical work going and involving many losing their lives, the collective spirit of pulling together is best represented in Géraldine Aresteanu’s ‘embedded’ photography on the ICU wards, in the tea-room, and in the moving testimonies of the staff that she recounts alongside the photographic images. Indeed, it was whilst reading her photo-textual work that I began to see how photography is a collective medium: we are all implicated in photographic images, we ‘own’ contemporary photography, are responsible for its meanings, collectively and democratically.

BB. If you were asked to choose a single photo-text from this study that encapsulates the expressive power of this creative medium, what would it be?

AS. As you’ve already mentioned, I chose as the front cover of the book one of the photographs in Chloe Dewe Mathews’ extraordinary 2014 project Shot at Dawn. Although a British photographer, Dewe Mathews visited sites in Northern France in 2014 where, exactly (to the minute) one hundred years before, soldiers – from Algeria, Belgium, Britain and France – were summarily shot for refusing to fight in the slaughter of the First World War.

Naturally, the pastoral image below contains none of the horror of the executions that took place there precisely a century before…. until we read the caption that Dewe Mathews supplies: the names, time and place of those executed in this beautiful corner of Northern France. In the book version of Shot at Dawn, the captions are placed on the facing or following page; more powerfully in the online version, the viewer clicks on each pastoral photograph only for the brutal caption to appear. It is an excellent example of the potential of the internet for the photo-text.

For me, with war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza, Shot at Dawn shows, in strikingly spectral fashion, that the sacrifice and the bravery of those who refused the horror of the slaughter of the First World War are anything but absent today.

BB. How did your interest in photo-texts develop as a research focus?

AS. The flippant answer is a student job that I had in the 1980s, in the pre-digital days when analogue photography had to be sent off to be ‘developed’. I worked one summer at the company Prontaprint, for which I had to match customers’ written descriptions with their photographs that had gone astray in the development process! The more serious answer is that I am a specialist of the work of the French critic Roland Barthes who, influenced by Brecht and other left-wing theorists, was one of the first, in the post-war period, to investigate what we now call ‘intermediality’: the interaction of two different media, such as photography and writing.

BB. Do you teach photo-texts as part of the university curriculum? If so, how does this work, and in what ways have student responses to the material struck you?

AS. The photo-text is an excellent way to teach a foreign language, and to increase what we call ‘oracy’. Students always produce fascinating and sophisticated readings of a photographic image, which then allows them to be both creative and imaginative in their commentaries in the target language. At the same time, in this age of the mobile camera on our smartphones producing millions of images every minute, students are rightly suspicious of manipulation by photography, and simultaneously excited by the infinite possibilities of putting text next to photography.

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