Photo-texts From Below

<p>What can photo-texts <em>do</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>Andy Stafford is Professor of French and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds.</p>