The image of the word and the word of the image: the photographic tale of Tércia Montenegro

Abstract

Throughout nearly twenty years of artistic production, Tércia Montenegro stresses the relationship between word and image in her short stories, essays, children’s books, and a novel. Specifically, from her work, I observe in this article what the author discusses in emphasizing the visual character
of literature, with an emphasis on the relation of the characters to photography. In his four short storybooks and some anthologies, Montenegro develops a kind of photographic writing in which bodies in his desires are presented pictorially without falling into naturalism and without losing the lyrical power. The photographs act thus as characters in the narratives, crossing times and conflicting memory and finitude. Finally, the humans of the tales are also artists of the image and seem to ask: Am I in the knowable or the visible?