Photography and Fiction

[Kirk Gittings]

The Walter 23 thread (http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=47205 got me thinking about photograpy and fiction. assuming I am right, I actually found his fictional story surrounding the "found" image compelling and intriguing, making we want to know the rest of the story. If it had been posted anywhere but here that image and story may have flown. I apologize if I am wrong about this assumption.

Most photography is documentary in nature. Are there good examples of photo-fiction? Witkin perhaps or Cindy Sherman, although there is no extended literary component beyond the titles. Are there any photo books with a larger literary component that do this well?

[RDB Korn]

Kirk

First of all, your assumption about the other thread is correct. I've seen the unadulterated version, but like I you truly enjoyed Walter's inventiveness.

Jeff Wall comes to mind - his images skate the line between documentary and fiction. They appear to be documentary photographs of real events, but are actually painstaking recreations. The recreation seems to embellish and expand on the event in a fictional way.

[Roger Thoms]

How about Steve M Hostetter in the March portraits thread. http://www.largeformatphotography.in...=46399&page=11

Roger Thoms

[walter23]

I have decided to make a hobby of looking for more negatives like that one. I think there are all sorts of interesting facilities nearby for me to explore; a couple of psychiatric facilities, an old military prison, and of course that research hospital I just have to figure out where to find all the interesting negatives. May take awhile.

There's a lot of fiction in photography. Ignoring the obvious (shooting a landscape from a lookout point but framing to exclude the parking lot, crowds of people, etc), there are things like all those civil war re-creation portraits on wet plate, people in the forest with fairy wings, etc.

The Walter 23 thread (http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ad.php?t=47205 got me thinking about photograpy and fiction. assuming I am right, I actually found his fictional story surrounding the "found" image compelling and intriguing, making we want to know the rest of the story. If it had been posted anywhere but here that image and story may have flown. I apologize if I am wrong about this assumption.

Most photography is documentary in nature. Are there good examples of photo-fiction? Witkin perhaps or Cindy Sherman, although there is no extended literary component beyond the titles. Are there any photo books with a larger literary component that do this well?

[QT Luong]

Joan Fontcuberta has made his entire career out of creating works with a fictional underlying story. His most well known work is "Fauna", that shows the the long-lost archives of a German zoologist full of animals such as flying elephants.

In a similar vein is Aleksandra Mir's "First Woman on the Moon".

[Daniel Grenier]

The work of Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall (both LFers, btw) immediately comes to mind when I hear the word "fiction".

[QT Luong]

To me, Crewdson and Wall's photographs are more about narrative (story implied by a single, posed, image) than fiction (story forming the justification, and much of the interest, for the work). On the other hand, Fontcuberta's books are very elaborate constructions with a lot of writing.

[Struan Gray]

W.G.Sebald.

[Oren Grad]

Perhaps not quite what you mean by fiction, but Duane Michals' sequences come to mind.

[Mark Sawyer]

Allegorical fictions have been in photography at least since 1858:


Henry Peach Robinson's "Fading Away"


Oscar Rejlander's "The Two Paths of Life"