The Photography of Short Stories: Thoughts on Space and Duration
This essay reflects on short storytelling in light of photographic theory, and considers whether the duration of short stories can be more fully understood in relation to photography. While photographs and short stories have previously been linked through the idea of limit, compression, and fragment...
Gardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Autor Principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| Acceso en liña: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | This essay reflects on short storytelling in light of photographic theory, and considers whether the duration of short stories can be more fully understood in relation to photography. While photographs and short stories have previously been linked through the idea of limit, compression, and fragmentation, this paper hopes to draw a closer connection between the two with regard to the flux of time, and contemplates the seemingly straightforward descriptor “short” as one that both encompasses and conceals the complexities of time-keeping in short storytelling. With reference to photo theory by Kaja Silverman (The Miracle of Analogy), George Baker (“Lateness and Longing”), and Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), this essay asks whether short stories can be seen to enact a kind of photographic time, and discusses Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, The Scrivener” as a study for the idea that it is perhaps the intimation of deferral, and the closing off of visual space, as much as brevity, that affords short stories their duration. |
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