Photo-texts From Below
Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins
Andy Stafford
Click cover to enlarge Booksellers & libraries: | Legenda
ISBN: 978-1-839542-14-5 (hardback) • RRP £95, $120, €120 ISBN: 978-1-839542-15-2 (paperback, forthcoming) ISBN: 978-1-839542-16-9 (JSTOR ebook) ContemporaryFrenchFictionPolitics What can photo-texts do, especially in the ‘Age of Catastrophe’ in which we now live? This study of 21st-century photo-texts analyses photography, in six separate chapters, alongside written language of all sorts (essay, commentary, story, caption, text-speak), in order to suggest, tentatively, a concerted, multi-actant facet to contemporary text-image creativity. The examples chosen are all French, or French-related, and in their multifarious ways contribute to a growing politicisation, since the turn of the Millennium, around the use of the photographic image as accompanied and inflected by written text. In this sense, the corpus reflects what British cultural historian Raphael Samuel once called ‘History from below’. Thus, photo-texts on migrancy and exile, on subaltern military resistance, on prison life, on ageing and the health-care sector since the pandemic, on youth alienation, on memories of Algerian independence, and on the workplace stereotype, are brought together and considered as varying and potent responses to the social conditions, and conditioning, of the marginalised, the oppressed and the silenced. Andy Stafford is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds. Bibliography entry: Stafford, Andy, Photo-texts From Below: Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins, Visual Culture, 8 (Legenda, 2025) First footnote reference: 35 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts From Below: Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins, Visual Culture, 8 (Legenda, 2025), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Stafford, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Stafford, Andy. 2025. Photo-texts From Below: Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins, Visual Culture, 8 (Legenda) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Stafford 2025: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Stafford 2025: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) This title is distributed on behalf of MHRA by Ingram’s. Booksellers and libraries can order direct from Ingram by setting up an ipage Account: click here for more. Permanent link to this title: www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Photo-texts-From-Below www.mhra.org.uk/publications/vc-8 |
26 June 2025 • 200pp