Photographic Encounters ― The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions

Literacy is broadly understood to refer to the ability to read and write. But the term is heavily value-laden and is often used to elevate print at the expense of other forms of communication. In PhotoGraphic Encounters, the authors challenge this reductive notion of literacy and propose instead an integrated span of literacies: reaching across disciplinary boundaries to discover a text that draws upon both the visual and the verbal. PhotoGraphic Encounters discusses Canadian writers like Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Robert Kroetsch, and Daphne Marlatt, and Canadian artists like Fred Douglas, Ernie Kroeger, Brenda Pelkey, and Michael Snow, then looks at the cross-fertilization of visual and verbal processes in their works. The authors present a new narrative practice, one that fully engages lived experience. The vernacular, they argue, is vital to our participation as readers and viewers of high art. Making the connection between the vernacular and high culture creates an enabling moment in artistic production and reception and in teaching, learning, and talking about art and literature. PhotoGraphic Encounters offers a compelling perspective on questions of literacy in a postmodern culture. Artists, writers, scholars, and critics alike will want this volume in their libraries. Includes more than 120 B&W photographs, 20 colour plates, index, bibliography.