Photobiography is a "person's
biography as revealed through
photographs". This is a
neologism that was used for the first time in the
French language
French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...
in ''Manifeste photobiographique'' (1983), written by
Gilles Mora Gilles Mora (born 1945) is a French photography historian and critic specialising in 20th century American photography, and photographer. He has edited books on Walker Evans, Edward Weston, W. Eugene Smith, Aaron Siskind and William Gedney, as well ...
and co-written with Claude Nori.
[Fabien Arribert-Narce, "Photographs in Autobiographies: Identities in Progress", In: ''Skepsi'', Vol. 1 (1), 2008, Graft & Transplant, p. 50.]
Generally, the photobiography illustrate and tell the facts of
life of famous people, such as
Abraham Lincoln,
Martin Luther King Jr.,
Albert Einstein, or
Eleanor Roosevelt. Although photobiographical publications have been used for
commercial purposes, several academics researches in
France and in the
United States "have been trying to redefine it since the end of the 1990s".
Generally, photobiography tend to show more pictures than text, although some writers have combined these two practices in a same work, as with Denis Roche, who is also a photographer. In contrast with both techniques, there has been discussion of how photography can affect an
autobiographical discourse.
Roland Barthes, for example, in his ''
Camera Lucida
A ''camera lucida'' is an optical device used as a drawing aid by artists and microscopists.
The ''camera lucida'' performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist se ...
'', suggests how photographs can fascinate the reader like no other images when he describes photography as a "pure deictic language".
[Barthes, ''Camera Lucida'', translated by Richard Howard (London:Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 5]
Further reading
*Alex Hughes, Andrea Noble, ''Phototextualities: intersections of photography and narrative'' (UNM Press, 2003), ,
*Eakin, Paul John, ''Touching the World. Reference in Autobiography'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
* Thélot, Jérôme, ''Les Inventions litéraires de la photographie'' (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Perspectives littéraires, 2003).
References
External links
{{wiktionary
Neologisms
Biography (genre)
Photography by genre