Fotografia
Photography

Summary/Abstract: An essay by Piotr Matywiecki, poet and essayist, about the literary context of photography: “One of the most influential contemporary myths is that of photography. To a certain degree the present-day world has adapted itself to the photograph and became ‘photogenic’. By the very nature of things this myth performs its greatest role in all that is visual and in the domain of the visual arts. Nonetheless, in a manner befitting a myth, it has already long ago expanded onto other spheres. In my essay I shall deal with the photographic qualities of speech, or, more narrowly, of literature and even more precisely: the works of Franz Kafka. The characteristic feature of this oeuvre, however, means that it immediately universalises each aspect of the reality, which it absorbs because it looks at it from a distance. In other words, while writing about the photographic qualities of Kafka’s prose I shall, by the force of things, write simply about literature as such and human speech. Quite possibly, it is precisely language that guides photography out of the darkroom of the myth and into the light of rationality. I cannot look at a photograph and think about it without activating assorted literary references in my consciousness“.

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