What Is the Relationship between Literature and Photography?
An exhibition in Switzerland explores the intersection between photobook publishing and art forms that combine text and image.
Sara Knelman, Untitled, n.d., from the series Lady Readers
Collection of Sara Knelman
The title of a recent exhibition at Musée des beaux-arts in the Swiss town of Le Locle (MBAL), The Pleasure of Text, is borrowed from Roland Barthes’s famous 1973 essay. A quote from that text stands out in the center of the room displaying paintings from the MBAL collection, depicting women engrossed in the act of reading: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body will follow its own ideas—for my body has different ideas than me.” This physical dimension of reading pleasure is exemplified in an installation by the Swiss duo Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg, who have created a new space in the museum’s former library, blending sculpture and automatic painting. The installation features a selection of their Bibliothèque Imaginaire (1999–2020), consisting of hundreds of wooden books that viewers are encouraged to explore. While the volumes cannot be read, the tactile experience of reading remains, and the text within them becomes a product of the viewer’s imagination.
© the artist
The Pleasure of Text is Federica Chiocchetti’s inaugural exhibition as the director of MBAL and holds a few surprises for those familiar with her academic and curatorial work. Especially with The Photocaptionist, the editorial and curatorial platform she founded and directs—Chiocchetti was also guest editor of Aperture’s 2019 issue of The PhotoBook Review on “photo-text-books”—she has focused on the relationship between text and images in literature and photography. This exhibition features the works of approximately thirty international artists in dialogue with pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. Instead of an exhibition solely dedicated to the theme of text-images in the context of photobooks, The Pleasure of Text takes a broader approach to the experience of reading by exploring the intersection between photography, photobook publishing, and other art forms that combine text and image making.
© the artist
In a project titled Lady Readers, Sara Knelman presents a series of photographs featuring women reading. It remains unknown what these women are reading. One striking image depicts a girl, somewhere between childhood and adolescence, sitting on a bench while reading a magazine, with her face concealed by cascading light blond hair. Melissa Catanese contributes to the same theme with her video piece Voyagers, based on her book of the same name published in 2018 by The Ice Plant. The video presents a selection of images of people reading from Peter J. Cohen’s collection, utilizing the book’s pages to offer the viewer a subjective sensory experience with the text.
© Estate of Jo Spence and courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London/Rome
The idea of reading (whether text or image) as a space of freedom and emancipation, particularly for women, is a prevalent theme throughout the exhibition. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?,” “Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.” A photograph by Jo Spence captures this sentiment. The image portrays the artist, disguised as a domestic worker, reading Sigmund Freud’s On Sexuality, wearing googly eye glasses with a comically bewildered expression. It serves as a visual metaphor for the feminist response to the accusations against Freud, who was accused of shifting the blame for sexual abuse from men to women and their imaginations.
Other notable examples of a relationship between text and writing include the works of Brazilian artist Lenora de Barros and Italian artist Ketty La Rocca. De Barros portrays herself in a photographic sequence from 1979 titled Poema, where she wedges her tongue between the gears of a typewriter. La Rocca, on the other hand, presents a series called Photograph with Js (1969–1970), in which she interacts with a sculpture shaped like the letter J, from the French word je, meaning I. As La Rocca explains, “The ‘you’ has already begun at the border of my ‘I’.”
© the artist
The exhibition concludes with works that directly relate to the curator’s passion for the text-image theme. Nelis Franken’s Perfect Forests (2020–23) is a leporello featuring black-and-white images of locations associated with technology companies, interspersed with texts generated using artificial intelligence. Luca Massaro showcases ten large canvas prints from his book Dizionario Vol.1 (Dictionary, 2023), capturing various words and letters in juxtaposed settings. Chloe Dewe Mathews, as part of the overlapping festival Alt+1000, explores the landscapes of Swiss mountains and the network of anti-atomic bunkers constructed within them in the 1960s, juxtaposing them with passages from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel conceived during her stay at Lake Geneva. The path design by Chioccetti also includes a series of photographs by Anne Turyn titled Lessons & Notes (1982), displayed in the room dedicated to children’s activities. The photographs depict a primary school classroom where children learn to read and write, featuring questions written on the blackboard against a backdrop of blurred figures.
© Estate of Ketty La Rocca/Michelangelo Vasta
Throughout Chioccetti’s and Dewe Mathews’s exhibitions, the continuous interplay between image and text highlights that concepts of the two can overlap. Pictures possess a lexicon, grammar, and syntax of their own, just as words, sentences, speeches, and stories can create mental images. In both cases, the resulting knowledge is most valuable and enduring when it stems from a pleasurable experience of exploration and understanding.
The Pleasure of Text is on view at Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, through September 18, 2023.
