Photo-texts From Below: Collectivist Dispatches from the 21st-Century French Margins

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 contem-porary text-image creativity. The examples chosen are all French, or French-related, and in their multifarious ways contri-bute 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.