Abstracts

When we speak of the relationship between images and text, the comic as medium inevitably comes into focus. In linguistic-graphic communication, we want to explore the extent to which the various techniques of the comic can be suitable for application in other text-image relationships. First and foremost, this concerns questions of documentation and information transfer: what can texts express; what can pictures tell us; what can the two convey together? What messages arise when these two media join forces?
In terms of form, we would like to dare an experiment: we do not wish to simply discuss the relationship between linguistic and visual codes. Rather, we will attempt to perform the discourse itself by means of speaking, writing, drawing and charting.

“The goal was to separate image from sound”, was the response from Swiss-French film artist Jean-Luc Godard to a question from a journalist who was interviewing him at a press conference set up on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival for his current film Le Livre d’image (The Image Book, 2018). The working title ‘Image et Parole’ (Image and Word), which was retained as the subtitle, already hints at the fact that the connection of image and language, which is accepted as a matter of course and which characterises the audiovisual medium of film, is here no longer assumed unconditionally. In the process, Godard returns to considerations he formulated as far back as 50 years ago. The year 1968 marks a crucial line of demarcation in the film artist’s work, one that can particularly be detected in the films La Chinoise (1967) and Le gai savoir (1969). Nietzschean nihilism, from which the latter borrowed its title, serves as a starting point for critical reflexion. Television would henceforth be chosen as a medium of this process. In this context, the episode Photo et Cie, which Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville created specifically for television as one part of their video series Six fois deux (1976), is particularly remarkable. My presentation will focus on these various historical points, from where it will shed new light on the relationship between images and language.

Words influence images, and images influence the words with which they are associated. In the conventional relationship between a photo and its caption the words are often used to precipitate a kind of quantum collapse in which the ambiguities of the image are constrained to a specific meaning. A more productive photo-text relationship is one in which the two media are allowed their separate voices, each amplifying (and sometimes contradicting) the other. In the hypertext, or hypermedia, the non-linear narrative encourages an often more ludic approach in which multiple meanings of both text and image are elicited depending upon where their places are in the various sequences. Photos can be image-mapped so that certain regions of the image lead into one narrative while other regions take the reader elsewhere. Or, more transgressively, the code of the image (or text) can be output as other media, such as music. Throughout all of this, the reader has greater and lesser possibilities to collaborate in determining meaning.

In Deutsche Bilder – eine Spurensuche (German Images – Looking for Evidence) Eva Leitolf investigates racist and xenophobic crimes in Germany and the ways they are discussed in society. The artist examines in Postcards from Europe the ways the European Union deals with its external borders and the associated internal conflicts. Eva Leitolf’s works relate images of places with carefully researched texts about past events at those sites. The interplay of image and text explores the phenomena of xenophobia and migration as well as aspects of perception, processes of formation of meaning and the bounds and possibilities of representation.

The collaborative practices of the Kashmir Photo Collective – a digital archive populated by photographic collections and historical material originating in the Kashmir Valley – are essential to the challenge that they present to conventional conceptions of family archives and especially to the pedagogical and scholarly potential of family photographs. For KPC, collaboration begins in the homes of the Kashmiri families where the collections are digitised, the space to which KPC returns repeatedly for gathering image context. This paper will reveal how memories – which appear as fragmented narratives during the archival act – are transformed through handwritten inscription by the archivist, and why this mode of memory-making allows the agency of the borrowed archive to remain with the progenitor of the album.