PHOTO–LITERARYPRACTICE

Abstract

In The Preparation of the Novel (1979), Roland Barthes claims about Japanese haiku poems that “there’s no interpretative relativity whatsoever: there’s nothing to be said about it. — Absolutely would be the haiku’s motto” (p. 79-80). This talk will examine the nature and status of the “absolute” mentioned here by Barthes, in relation to the haiku that he explored in depth since the publication of Empire of Signs in 1970, but also to other media he studied closely in the 1970s such as photography (e.g. in Camera Lucida, his last work published in 1980). Despite the careful attention he paid to the multiple layers of meaning and interpretation throughout his career, the French semiotician did not believe, of course, that everything is relative. He formulated in the later part of his life an aspiration for a form of absolute expression able to resist commentaries, interpretations and descriptions, at the intersection between image and text. His quest of the Absolute, encapsulating the trace of a unique, singular encounter with the world, led him to develop a meditation on time, memory and anamnesis, presence and absence, and thereby on life writing, in particular via the haiku and photography that he often compared as we will see by analysing the notion of the “undevelopable” – this is close to other neighbouring notions such as the “intractable”, and Walter Benjamin’s “aura”. This Barthesian idiosyncratic approach to the photo/text may be offering us a precious antidote to preserve authenticity in the age of AI produced images, as I will argue.

Abstract

In this practice-based research talk, Nogues will discuss two current practice-based research projects, reflecting on the ways digital tools enable creative writing encounters with visuality and archives. The first project, Feels Like Power, is a digital manuscript-in-progress that combines the medium of immersive VR with the methodology of documentary poetry. The project’s immersive panoramic poems are set in and around US military installations in the Pacific region, at sites in Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and Guåhan (Guam), and explore the impact of the U.S. military presence by focusing on liminal and contested spaces including perimeter fence zones, war tourism sites, and groundwater drainage systems. The project also examines the ways domestic life overlaps with the war machine, allowing a view inside the domestic spaces that house and sustain the thousands of military family members leading suburban American lives on overseas bases. Ultimately, the poems leverage immersive VR’s affective power to bring archival materials from different contexts into contact with each other, allowing their resonances to emerge in multiple dimensions, and holding nature, capital, and postcolonial bodies in conversations that re-imagine our current world from crises towards possible actions.

The second project, the Grieving Machine, a bespoke, local LLM designed as an artist’s book. Materially, it is a small, portable box that sits on a desk and can be accessed with a touchscreen and keyboard. It is not connected to the cloud or backed up; it is, instead, a singular artwork, vulnerable to loss or damage the way singular artworks, and individual humans, are always vulnerable to their environments. The machine’s training data is a corpus of Nogues’s writing after the catastrophic flash flooding in central Texas (USA) on 4 July 2025. Human-caused climate change was likely a factor in the flooding, whose epicenter was her hometown, Hunt. 135 people died, and Hunt’s infrastructure, including its post office and only store, was erased. In the months that followed, Nogues lost, to other causes, three family members who lived in the area. In designing the Grieving Machine, she asks, how can a local LLM be trained to engage with human grief on multiple scales at once, from the intimate to the public and planetary? More pointedly, can a person put their grief into it? Can it then co-author poems that are worth reading? What can trying show us about the future of the book in the age of GenAI, or about the risks and appeal of AI grief aids, or about our responsibilities to each other and our environment in the face of the competitive, meteoric development of commercial LLMs?

Abstract

“The observations of the interior monologuist, like the images of the street photographer, have no debts to finality, can be made of pure contingency, are the point of intersection of the street’s temporalities and the inner time of the monologuist/photographer.” (Clive Scott, Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson). This paper celebrates the contingency of the creative process. Through poems and street photographs, it looks at the practice of creative writing and street photography via Walter Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction, Heidegger’s notion of the work of art as a form of unveiling, and Max van Manen’s notion of applied phenomenology. It also looks at Han Byung-chul’s treatment of vita contemplativa as part of the exploration of the creative process as an attentional mode of being.

Abstract

How can one exorcise the influence of a foreign city when the year spent there proves too discontinuous to make sense to oneself? My project adopts the dossier as a photo-literary form, activating materials from postgraduate life in London to stage an experiment in dédoublement: giving the past self a sensible form through which to know him anew.

Following Chris Marker’s advice, il faudrait se tutoyer toute sa vie, the book divides the autobiographical subject into a writing ‘I’ and an absent ‘you’ who exists only through a digital archive. Recalling Barthes’s account of Proust’s author-narrator indecision, ‘I’ constructs, rather than remembers or confesses, a self unknown before writing. The book alternates between second-person narration, in which past experiences are loosened through free indirect discourse, and more playful episodes. From YouTube script to automatic writing and shopping lists, they use stylistic experiment to invent possibilities of being that actual life denied. ‘Heterofiction’ names this interweaving of autobiography and fiction, self-expression and self-estrangement.

With organic memory deliberately bracketed, external memory supplies narrative resources and models the book’s format. Among its heterogenous materials, the dossier stages image and text as doubled tracks joined by reciprocal anchoring. Immersed in the photographic archive and images retrieved online, the narrator seeks to understand the absent addressee and bring their separate moments into coappearance. The digital condition makes the past available for re-creation without necessarily annulling the force of original events. Life writing becomes less recovery of presence than presentification: the writer encounters, with surprise, a self he nonetheless recognises.

Abstract

What happens when we can make a photograph but cannot return to it? This talk begins with photographs I took around my grandmother’s death in 2019 but could not look at again for seven years. I describe this condition as living with photographic ruins: carrying images that remain materially intact while the relations they preserve cannot be readily entered. Through three practices of photopoetic writing—tracing an unphotographed shimmer, stitching dispersed familial traces across frames, and re-entering shifting familial positions through repeated act of holding—I return to relations that had remained absent, dispersed, or unreadable within and around the photographs. From these returns, I develop attendability as a belated relational capacity to remain with and respond to what photographs preserve without making it fully available. I argue that photopoetry’s potential as a form of life writing lies not in repairing an earlier form of attention, but in changing the conditions of “living with”: making it possible to stay with photographic ruins “for a while”, leave, and return again.