Summary
“The photograph […] A meaninglessness surrounds it which can only be filled in by the addition of a text”, writes Rosalind Krauss ([1] “Notes on the Index: Part 1”. In: Rosalind Krauss: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England 1986, pp. 196-209, here: p. 205): In the journal, this incomplete, fragmentary photographic image never appears in isolation; on the contrary, it forms a constellation with a multitude of paratexts: cross-references, framings and further illustrations. Within journal literature, photographic images are accessed as part of a dense network of simultaneous or sequential references, and thereby ‘de-fragmented’.
In the analysis of text-based journal literature, photography therefore serves, on the one hand, as a foil, for photographs have indeed always been published serially and periodically whilst, at the same time, following a logic that stands in opposition to text-based formats. On the other hand, however, photography also functions as a paratextual partner (intermedial and intertextual) which enters into simultaneous constellations with written texts in the layout of journals. Photography is seen as in tension with linguistic texts in the sense that photographic images – in contrast to texts formed in the medium of writing (and also in contrast to traditional images) – are regarded as fragments, as slices of the space-time continuum.
One of the aims of the sub-project is therefore to characterise the media format of the journal as a specific form of de-fragmentation of photographs. The effect the journal format has on photography is precisely non-fragmenting; in fact, in makes connections. On the one hand, these are ‘internal to the medium’, such as when photographic images are serialised within the same issue or across several issues, giving rise to constellations of photographic images contained within these. On the other hand, they span ‘across media’, when text, typography and different pictorial media interrelate, offering a plurality of meanings.
In this sense, the project strives in two directions: on the one hand, it attempts to define the coherence the journal format gives to photographs; on the other, it attempts to demonstrate how illustrated journals are being transformed by the emergence of the new, technical pictorial form. Through formal and semantic analysis, constellations of photographs typical of the journal will be differentiated historically, generically and in terms of comparison between countries (Germany, France, Great Britain), by identifying two technology-defined phases. For the years 1844 to 1880, the project analyses photographs collated into series which are often marketed as so-called serial works on a subscription basis and oscillate between book and journal (e.g. Talbot‘s The Pencil of Nature). Travel and portrait photographs in particular are published in periodical form and supplemented with text. With the autotype, which takes hold around 1910 as a process of printing text and photography together, photography establishes itself as the norm in journal illustration. For both phases, the project will define the characteristic strategies which create meaning and are used sequentially between the journal numbers (e.g. typical rubric) or on the double page of the journal (e.g. in montages or mosaics of images).
This makes it possible to analyse whether photography affirms or retracts its fragmentary nature in the context of the journal and, accordingly, to what extent it is used to contaminate its context, to close down or open up the texts constellated around it. Where and when do constellation types such as mosaic images arise? How do they consolidate and distribute themselves? How tightly are they bound to the medium of photography? What meanings do they generate? The sub-project will define the various methods of reference and attempt to compare the corresponding literary and visual strategies that are addressed by the other sub-projects. Only against this background can photography-specific manifestations be precisely defined. Conversely, processes of fragmentation and de-fragmentation central to journal literature and their subsequent flow effects (i.e. references forwards and backwards which break up units of meaning and put them back together differently) can be systematised in terms of ideal types and can be productive for the other media integrated into the medium of the journal: how are different media constellated within the medium of the journal?