Images of who writes: notes about the place of the writer

Abstract

The dialogue between different arts is one of the marks of contemporary literary and cultural theory and criticism, interested in the interdisciplinary character of cultural phenomena and artistic objects. In this essay, I analyze some aspects of the relationship between image and word in the photobiographical work The place of the writer, by photographer Eder Chiodetto. From the reading of some photos and commentaries of the writers, I propose connections between the notions of punctum and biographeme, in the terms of Roland Barthes, that operate in close relation with the dissolution of rigid borders in contemporary aesthetics, whether in the scope of biographical criticism or iconographical. I conclude the discussion by highlighting impurity and ephemerality as the basic aspects of Chiodetto’s work, whose originality and beauty are separated from linearity, orthodox sequencing and objective attainment. Death – captured by camera flash – and life – reinvented in fragments of itself delivered by writers – are implicated in each other, doubly contaminated.