View 13: Auto-Photo-Biographies
Managing editors: Katarzyna Bojarska, Tomasz Szerszeń
Deadline: February 15th, 2016

http://pismowidok.org/index.php/one/announcement/view/49

„But are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model?”, Paul de Man asked in his essay Autobiography as De-facement. While referentiality of photography seems almost undisputable in the case of the portrait, in autobiography this relationship becomes problematic, the apparent directness open to doubt. Since the publication of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida – an autobiographic project which at the same time was an attempt at creating a theory of the photographic image – photography has grown stronger as an autobiographic tool. Auto-photo-biography, as an unspecified hybrid genre, which brings together questions crucial for both autobiography and photography, gains its artistic (as well as theoretical) force from a split and incoherence: it provides a platform for an encounter of past and present, Self and Other, document and fiction, text and image…. The act of questioning autobiography becomes simultaneously a redefinition of photography, a gesture of its re-thinking.

Issue 13 of "View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture" provides a space for an interdisciplinary reflection on cases of such auto-photo-biographies, and more generally: on the construction of individual history as micro-history or counter-history, where literary text interacts with photographic images or mediates them in interesting and at times troubling ways. The practices in question span from the description of photographs, their reproductions to narratives / configurations made of images solely. We invite texts devoted to analysis of particular case studies of such auto-photo-biographies, theoretical essays as well as comparative studies. We are especially interested in original ways of addressing the above questions in light of recent methodological developments in visual studies, literary studies, feminist / queer / postcolonial theory, etc.

Deadline for submissions: February 15th, 2016.

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