Oltreoceano - Rivista sulle migrazioni

Flashes Between the Lines. Photography and Migrant Writing

Silvana Serafin — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article traces the evolution of the word / image relationship, which has become tangible with the appearance of photo-texts. Despite illustrious, albeit discontinuous, antecedents which date back to the iconotexts of the Late Middle Ages and include modern illustrations, satirical cartoons and nineteenth- and twentieth-century comics, photo-texts have attracted the attention of readers especially since the 1980s, when criticism began to lay the basis for considering it a genre in its own right. Since William Morris coined the term in 1972, visual arts and literature experts, such as Hollander, Trachtenberg, Shawcross, Barthes, Montandon and, more recently, Michele Cometa, have indeed analyzed the rhetorical forms used in this ambiguously hybrid art form which is dually distinguished by writing and light - that suspended instant of pure contingency captured by the photograph. Their pioneer investigations have singled out the recurring features of this art form and contributed to the definition of the genre, which is still in progress. In light of the special importance that visual elements play in migrant writing, this article attempts to identify some of the theoretical categories common to both phototexts and migrant literary works, where the autobiographical element is strengthened through the use of photographs, postcards or cut-out recipes. It is indeed in the narrations of migrants, which are always conditioned by the memory of the past and the need to bear witness to personal and collective tragic vicissitudes, that the close correlation between image and text emerges most prominently and perfectly in sync with the features of photo-texts. By virtue of their expertise in the field, the present study enter the void between photography and narration which is filled by the reader’s imagination. It provides interesting insights.

A first approach to the interaction between text and image in the Mexican edition of 1900 of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha

José Francisco Medina Montero — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Don Quixote arrived in the Spanish colonies in 1605, the same year in which its first part was published. For more than two centuries, Cervantes’ novel circulated widely thanks to copies produced in Spain and the numerous stagings of the work in the Americas. However, it was not until the first third of the 19^th century that the novel was published on the continent. More precisely, the first edition would see the light of day in Mexico, 1833. Years later, in 1900, another edition was published, also in Mexico, which stands out for its magnificent engravings. This study will focus on this adornment and the rich text that it accompanies as well as the resulting interaction between images and text.
Of the first eight editions published in Latin America, six were produced in Mexico (in 1833, 1842, 1852-1853, 1868-1869, 1877 and 1900) and two in the Southern Cone subregion; one in Chile (1863) and one in Uruguay (1880). In this article, I will transcribe the text annexed to the illustrations before investigating possible links between the images and text. Given the huge amount of material, on this occasion I will only give a general overview of the photo-texts found and highlight their most notable characteristics. For example, I will consider whether there is a direct relationship between the illustrations that contain text and other illustrations without text that are placed before or after them. I will also look at whether text included within illustrations has been modified when compared with the novel’s text and if there are any spelling mistakes or other linguistic inaccuracies. In a future article, I will examine some of the phraseological units in illustrations, focussing particularly on idiomatic locutions, which are by far the most numerous of the various types of unit found. In this way, I hope to succeed in the difficult task of discovering whether the enormous conceptual richness hidden in fixed expressions is reflected in the images to which they are attached.

Photographs and subjective representations of Italian emigration to Argentina

Fernanda Elisa Bravo Herrera — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The objective of this work is to identify and analyze the ways in which images and subjective representations are constructed and inscribed in narrative texts related to Italian migration in Argentina, based on their articulation with the photographic code. The selected texts are the novels Emigrati. Studio e racconto (1880-1881) by Antonio Marazzi, Un caffè molto dolce (1996) by Maria Luisa Magagnoli, Oltremare (2007), Vincendo l’ombra (2009) by Mariangela Sedda, Il fioraio di Perón (2009) by Alberto Prunetti, Il cacciatore di ombre. In viaggio con Don Patagonia (2011) by Tito Barbini, the photo-book Roots. Radici (2022) by Bruna Martini and the film Nuovomondo (2006) directed by Emanuele Crialese. The corpus is approached from sociocriticism, imagology and comparative literature for the reconstruction of the cultural subject, the identity representations and the imaginary community and the multiple interrelations between word and photographic image. The study of the connections between literature and photography is based on the proposals of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, Silvia Albertazzi and Paola Corti, among others. Photography is conceived as a semiotic device that articulates the relationships between subjects, objects, values, and vital, socio-historical, and cultural experiences. The analysis of the textual inscriptions of the photograph considers its plurality of registers: as a theme, as ekphrasis that establishes a double mimesis, as a testimonial and autobiographical document that is modeled as a relic, trace and presence of an absence, in the configuration of a character as photographer or photographed subject, as a discursive strategy and technique and from its representative and narrative autonomy. In this way, it is hoped to outline an analysis of the dialectic between word and photographic image, as systems of expression intertwined in the constitution of the subject in the narration of migratory displacement.

The dragon’s shadow behind my back is not death’s embrace. Symbols of fear, strangeness, and hospitality in Migrantes by Issa Watanabe and The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Diego Alexander Vélez Quiroz — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The fabulous keys of Issa Watanabe’s Migrantes refract the fantastic trajectories of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Both works pursue a certain universality—albeit one not free from tension—in their representation of the migratory experience. Thirteen years separate their publication, and a century seems to lie between their stories: Tan’s narrative advances toward the luminous horizon of modernity, while Watanabe’s sinks into the telluric substance of mourning and reciprocity. The movement unfolds from the comic to the tragic, from the idealization of estrangement to the disillusionment of the real. Through their visual symbols, the two books express opposing cosmologies of migration: one linked to the Enlightenment imaginary of human perfectibility (The Arrival), and the other rooted in a relational and cyclical conception of life (Migrantes). This opposition defines specific aesthetic and ideological singularities and determines two distinct ways of understanding the symbols and imaginaries associated with the migratory experience, particularly those related to death. The article situates both narratives within the tradition of wordless picture books that, by renouncing verbal narration, transform silence into a form of meaning. It employs symbolic hermeneutics and Rodrigo Argüello’s simboanalysis to interpret the visual devices as spaces of condensation where mythical, affective, and ideological dimensions converge. The comparative reading explores how each work constructs a semiotic order of its own: Tan’s images, shaped by the modern allegory of progress and the moral pedagogy of integration, contrast with Watanabe’s nocturnal procession, guided by a cosmology that conceives death as continuity and care. By confronting two cultural regimes—the Eurocentric, governed by the ascending logic of light and reason, and the Andean, sustained by reciprocity and the vital cycle between life and death—the study explains how the experience of mobility is imagined through heterogeneous symbolic grammars. Ultimately, both works expose the tensions between universality and difference and propose, through silence and image, a meditation on the fragile conditions of belonging that shape contemporary migration.

Transparentes. Semasiology of the phototextual silences of Colombian exile

Mariarosaria Colucciello — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The aim of this article is to scrutinize, unravel, and problematize the hidden, symbolic, and emotional meaning that is woven and condensed behind the lexical and semantic silences present in some of the photo-texts in Transparentes. Historias del exilio colombiano by Javier de Isusi (2020). This literary, graphic, and testimonial work – awarded the 2021 Euskadi Prize for Literature – brings together, articulates, and reinterprets the testimonies of protagonists belonging to diverse ethnicities, cultures, generations, and social groups, unified by the shared experience of forced displacement, loss, and the search for identity reconstruction resulting from the prolonged Colombian armed conflict. Collected by the Truth Commission team in the many countries where these people sought refuge, rebuilt ties, and redefined their memories, the voices and lives of these testimonies intersect, dialogue, and converge in hybrid photo-texts, loaded with narrative density, visual power, and symbolic depth, where images and words complement each other, are stretched and mutually rewritten. However, amid this expressive abundance, the disturbing presence of silences emerges, intentional pauses that reveal as much as they conceal. Hence the need to interpret and highlight the latent semasiology and emotional charge that lies behind the absence of the spoken word. These lexical and rhetorical omissions, far from representing simple discursive gaps, constitute spaces of resistance, areas of refuge, and strategies for protecting against trauma, allowing the author to construct a universe of meaning that is prudent, respectful, and ethically committed. Through this expressive restraint, De Isusi offers a symbolic and emotional refuge to the protagonists, without detracting from their profound need to narrate their pain, to give shape to their loss, and to reinscribe their experience in the collective memory of exile.

Regimes of Visibility and Forms of Memory

Alessandra Ferraro — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This issue investigates the iconotext as a device in which words and images do not simply add up, but co-produce meaning through friction, montage, ellipsis, and paratextual thresholds. Against the backdrop of the visual turn, sixteen contributions—grouped by linguistic areas (Anglophone studies on the United States; Francophone studies on Québec, Lebanon, and the Antilles; studies on Spanish America)—are presented as thematic constellations that cut across geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
The first constellation foregrounds devices, the page, and materiality: genealogies of phototext and migrant writing, editorial practices (illustrated editions and magazines), and poetics in which photography becomes a model of attention and viewpoint. The second constellation focuses on archives, counter-archives, and the politics of visibility: photographic documents are questioned as sites of power, where race, postcolonial histories, and war require strategies of intervention, slowing down, and anti-spectacular ethics. The third constellation addresses migration, autobiography, and testimony: graphic memoirs, phototexts, and wordless narratives show how displacement also works as a form (discontinuity, sequencing, ellipsis) and how silence can operate as a mode of care for trauma. Taken together, the essays propose a shared methodological compass: a “double-entry” reading that combines attention to material features (supports, layout, paratexts, rhythm) with an analysis of pragmatic effects (what images enable, postpone, contradict, or keep unsaid).

Verbal and Visual Materialities. Drifts in a Conversation with Monique Régimbald-Zeiber

Monique Régimbald-Zeiber, Giada Silenzi — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For over thirty-five years, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber has explored the registers of the intimate and the political through a singular body of pictorial and textual work, situated at the intersection of the visible and the textual. This interview, born of a sustained dialogue between Montreal and Udine, revisits the aesthetic and theoretical foundations of a practice that fully embraces the emergence of a new materiality grounded in language, in an age of digital saturation where the overproduction of dematerialized images tends to erode both vision and memory. Through an in-depth exchange, the Québécoise artist reflects on the theoretical underpinnings of her approach, shaped by a transdisciplinary background that has led her toward a dialogical and relational conception of creation, at the crossroads of visual arts and literary studies, where artistic practice unfolds through openness to the other. Her work, conceived as a space of transmission and sharing, brings forth a counter-history built from the layering of pictorial and textual gestures and from the voices of multiple women who reawaken fragments forgotten or erased from official historiography. Régimbald-Zeiber approaches her work first and foremost as a reader, drawing on her readings as a living source that she transposes onto her chosen surfaces. Through the act of copying, she extends and reconfigures the practice of reading; through the montage of testimonies and diverse voices, she weaves a network of unexpected and resonant echoes.

«Hanging by a String». Self-Narrative in Sylvie Laliberté's Phototextual Work

Elisa Bricco — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

According to Claude Burgelin, contemporary autobiographical writing seeks to forge links between the self and the outside world, between memory and the present, while exploring the limits of literature. Sylvie Laliberté, a Quebec artist of Italian origin, embodies this approach in her phototext Je ne tiens qu'à un fil. Mais c'est un très bon fil (2015). The title, both ironic and fragile, evokes the precariousness of existence and the resilience of identity, symbolised by a red string that runs through the work. In an intermedial and fragmented narrative, Laliberté combines texts, images and objects to compose a kind of individual mythology. The pages alternate between prose, aphorisms in colourful capital letters, and photography. This fragmentation reflects the complexity of contemporary life, where identity is constructed in fragments, between memory and everyday life. The portmanteau word “sylvielaliberté”, handwritten in red string, embodies her intimate self, distinct from her social “I”. This doubling reveals an inner dialectic: a woman who is both rebellious and vulnerable, attentive to others. The string structures the narrative, connecting the fragments of a life. The author explores her role as a woman and her place in the world with writing that is brief and poetic, condensed with emotions and reflections, mixing banality and depth. Her narrative, between irony and melancholy, shows how writing about oneself becomes an act of resistance and permanent reconstruction.

The role of images (and texts) in the cross-cultural project of Quebec magazine Vice Versa

Filippo Fonio — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Quebec magazine Vice Versa (1983-1996), founded by, among others, Fulvio Caccia, writer and theorist of literary translingualism and accurate observer of the Franco-Canadian intercultural melting pot, and his brother Gianni, the magazine’s artistic director, devoted particular attention to the graphic dimension and to the potential of the photographic medium. Photography is acknowledged as an artistic medium in its own right – see issue no. 43 (1993), which is largely devoted to a “photo special” – but the editors also use photography as a dialogical form between images and theoretical, militant and fictional texts; at the same time they refuse to consider photographs as a form of illustration of the written word. The magazine’s desire to systematically situate itself as close as possible to reality, to debates (translinguistic, but also transartistic and societal) is thus amplified by the use of photography, seen as “a way of appropriating portions of reality, and in some cases even intervening in reality” (Denis Martineau). More often than not, as Gilbert Duclos, who became one of the magazine’s main photographers, explicitly acknowledges, the relationship between images and text must be inferred by the reader, as the magazine remains faithful to its “Babelian” editorial line, centered on the desire for a non-hierarchical juxtaposition of languages, debates and artistic media in the service of a mosaic and collective construction of culture in migrant context.

Beyrouth Aller-Retour by Fouad Elkoury: Fragments of Life from the Lebanese War

Giorgia Lo Nigro — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores Beyrouth aller-retour by the Lebanese author and photographer Fouad Elkoury, a photo-autobiographical work that offers an intimate and subjective vision of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Drawing on semiotic approaches, the study analyzes how text and image interact, respond to one another, and complement each other to construct a singular and original narrative of the Lebanese conflict. The first part highlights how this visual-textual dispositif is traversed by a «rhetoric of the gaze» (Cometa 2016) of the in-between, establishing a complex perspective oscillating between proximity and distance, between emotional involvement and critical detachment. The second part examines the effects of this gaze on the representation of war, emphasizing the thematic and aesthetic choices that arise from it. The analysis also shows that Beyrouth aller-retour deconstructs the codes of photojournalistic reporting in order to question the very capacity of the image to depict violence. Rejecting any form of spectacularization of the conflict, Elkoury adopts an introspective approach in which visual silence becomes a subtle form of resistance to the horror experienced by Lebanese men and women between 1975 and 1990. Far from any documentary intent, the work creates a space of vision where war is no longer shown but thought through the evocative power of the everyday. Through the careful interplay between text and image, the study demonstrates that Elkoury develops a language of trace and absence, in which photography becomes a site of critical reflection on the limits of what can be seen and what can be said in the face of violence.

Phototext and Migrant Identity in Ady, soleil noir by Gisèle Pineau

Tania Abbisso — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Gisèle Pineau, one of the most prominent voices in the literature of the French Antilles, explores in her works the tensions of the Afro-descendant diaspora, the migratory experience, and the condition of women in the former French colonies, in the line of postcolonial Francophone literature. This article analyzes her novel Ady, soleil noir (2021), awarded the Prix du Roman Historique, as a postcolonial phototext that revisits the forgotten figure of Adrienne Fidelin, a Guadeloupean dancer and model associated with Surrealism and the famous photographer Man Ray in the Thirties. Narrated in the first person, the narrative follows Ady’s journey as an orphan who leaves Guadeloupe for Paris, where she faces exile and marginalisation, but also gains access to an artistic universe in which she redefines her identity. The thirteen photographs inserted into the narrative structure create a visual journey that accompanies the main character, offering a reflection on female and diasporic identity. In this way, the novel constructs a literary and photographic archive that connects the dynamics of individual and collective memory. The research is based on two hypotheses: (1) Pineau uses the phototext device as an intersemiotic narrative form to produce a counter-narrative of colonial history; (2) Ady’s voice, although fictional, represents a strategy of identification that allows the author to transpose her own experience of creoleness and uprootedness to the protagonist. By comparing Pineau to the theoretical context of visual studies and phototext studies (Mitchell, Cometa, Cortellessa, Nachtergael), the article shows how Ady, soleil noir recovers a marginalized figure and constructs a phototext that challenges the colonial gaze, without however erasing its ambivalences.

Words and Images in Migration. Elizabeth Bishops’s “Iconotexts” and “Phototexts”

Andrea Mariani — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In spite of the fact that what Pound called phanopoeia is an essential ingredient in Elizabeth Bishop’s production (see her frequent and consistent use of ekphrasis, synesthesia, alliteration), only a few scholars have analyzed in depth the successful intersections/interplay between the verbal and the visual dimensions in the organization of her creative strategies. The present essay aims at interpreting three less known outputs of Bishop’s imagination, according to a method which gives full account of her masterly intersemiotic experimentations. A short introductive section moves from Bishop’s poetic outputs, provides the necessary contextualization, and examines in depth the varieties and modalities of the relationship with her visual imagination, as well as the recurring interest in the art and technique of photography. The following section deals with what can be defined “explicit iconotexts”, analyzing Bishop’s visual production, in its intersection with her poetic subtext. A third section faces the problem of interactions between word and image, when the latter is introduced as an illustration, a commentary, or an integration of the former. In the reportage Brazil (1962), a work that can be defined a “collaborative output”, since it is the result of the cooperation of several authors working in different epistemological fields, the written text establishes a fruitful dialogue with an extremely rich apparatus of photographs. In the supple volume Exchanging Hats (a catalogue of Bishop’s watercolors exhibited in 1993), edited by William Benton, the paintings create an implicit, intriguing counterpoint to her poems, whose virtual figurative effectiveness materializes on canvas. In her posthumously published E. A. Poe and the Juke-box (A. Quinn Ed., 2006), the presence of visual and verbal sketches, handwritten and typewritten pages, along with snapshots of Bishop’s journals, allows scholars to feel immersed in the poet’s creative energy in its making.

Journeys to the Past. Exploring the Visual Archive of Slavery in Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened And I Cried

Anna Scacchi — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996), an installation she created when she was asked by the Getty Museum to respond to their exhibition Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is a series of appropriated photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth century that she enlarged, cropped, colored and inscribed with short texts that weave them into a narrative. Among the repurposed images are the infamous daguerreotypes of enslaved Black Americans taken by J. T. Zealy for Swiss-American scientist Louis Agassiz in 1850 to support his theory of polygenesis. By the early 1990s they had become emblematic of the violence of representation and though Weems had signed an agreement with Harvard University, the institution that claimed to own them, that she would not use them in her work, she decided she had the moral right to reclaim them. As a conceptual artist engaged in debunking the assumptions of authenticity, objectivity and truthfulness on which documentary photography relied, Weems aimed less to redress the humanity of the violated Black sitters, then to reveal through her work on their images the epistemic system produced by slavery and colonialism.

Read in sequence, the words engraved on the glass placed over the prints create a compelling, poetic monologue that dialogues and clashes with the images to revisit the history of the stereotyping of Black Americans and highlight the imbrication of visuality and racism. Basing on Linda Hutcheon’s concept of photo-graphy, that is to say postmodern photographic works that are in themselves «both photo and graphic» (124) –the hyphen signaling the equal weight of both media – the article analyzes the series as a photo-text that aims to trouble the racial visual archive produced by slavery in the US, querying its authority and its reliance on the referentiality and indexicality of photography.

Beyond Mimesis. Claudia Rankine and Toyin Ojih Odutola in Conversation

Livia Bellardini — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Poet Claudia Rankine and visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola place blackness at the center of their artistic practice. Having both relocated respectively from Jamaica and Nigeria to the US at a young age, they’ve matured a first-hand experience of how identity is constantly being shaped and re-shaped by context. Through hybrid poetic forms and tonal fields, Rankine and Odutola resort to the artist’s tools not only to subvert US cultural narratives that reduce blackness to a signifier of race, but more relevantly to enlist color as both the subject and the main question of their work. Juxtaposed to one of Citizen’s central poems on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Odutola’s drawings appear in the collection as a gateway for engaging and privileging a new language, structure, and semantics for blackness.
On the one hand, Rankine’s multimodal collection works at the edge of a canon, with acts of racism crowding the book through poems, photographs, and portraits to expose and undermine the white external gaze. On the other hand, Odutola works from photography only to move beyond it. While her human-size portraits are photograph-inspired in terms of subject matter, they are portrait-specific in terms of the materials she uses: black ballpoint, graphite, and acrylic fuel her drawings, outlining “a new grammar for blackness” (2016). She moves beyond her photographic source to re-tell the story of blackness through the line’s travels and lock the external gaze to the portrait’s matter. As Rankine states in an article dedicated to Odutola’s work, “her artistic project demands the preeminence of the mark which […] renders a peripatetic blackness” (2016), both materially and epistemologically. Borrowing from Èdouard Glissant’s theorization of a “poetics of relation” and from Barbie Zelizer’s coinage of the “subjunctive voice” to describe how spectators engage with or complete the suspended narrative often captured in photographs, I will also engage with lyric and art theory to explore how the artists’ formal choices allow readers/viewers to inhabit the work’s subjunctive dimension, complicating the historical pull in a white supremacist frame that views blackness as a racial demarcation.

W. C. Williams: View by Color Photography on a Commercial Calendar

Maria Cristina Giorcelli — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The essay presents a close analysis of a poem that is explicitly based on the color photograph of the panorama of a small Swiss town, as seen by the American poet William Carlos Williams in a commercial calendar, that is, not in an artistic photograph, taken by a famous photographer, but in a completely ordinary photograph, without particular merit, by an anonymous photographer, and that, nevertheless,

had the advantage of being faithful to reality.

It should be remembered that, throughout his life, Williams was interested in photography and was friends with famous photographers: from Alfred Stieglitz to Charles Sheeler, among others. Williams appreciated about photography that, for the most part, it does not lie, in that, for the most part, it reproduces reality with great accuracy. This fidelity closely resembles the motto that sums up Williams' credo: "No ideas but in things," that is, there is no art without close connection to the "things" of the world. In this poem, the elements that Williams emphasizes of the landscape that photography returns to him are those that, at that time in his life, were very important to him: the church and the flowers, that is, the spiritual and the earthly dimensions, respectively. Substantially agnostic, especially in his later years (hence, the inescapable significance of the calendar), Williams appreciated the mercy of the church, while, as he had always done throughout his career, he celebrated, once again, the generosity and authenticity of nature. In both of these realities he saw the beauty that could save himself and all human beings.

Darkrooms and migrant memories in Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White

Mattia Arioli — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay discusses the way in which Lila Quintero Weaver, in her graphic novel Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, exploits the ontological differences that separate photography, a hot medium, from comics, a cold medium, to use McLuhan’s famous definitions, in order to reconstruct and problematize the migratory experience of her own family, that left Argentina in the 1960s to move to Marion, Alabama. In many of the pages that comprise the comics, the panels attempt to mimic the photographic images that often compose the family album. These family photographs are here remediated through the author’s graphic style. Their meaning is complicated by their juxtaposition to other photos: those that appear on official documents, necessary for emigration; those that are found in glossy magazines, which invite consumers to adopt the American Way of Life, and testify to the assimilation drives that the family is subjected to; and, finally, images belonging to the public archive, including the Selma to Montgomery marches, that remind the reader of the complex historical moment in which the author’s family migrated to the US. This visual solution aims to show the relationship between public history and private stories. The choice to use a black and white palette is also highly symbolic as it reminds the reader of the racial conflict that pervaded US society, but also testify to pressures to conform to one of the two groups that the author’s family was subjected to, as from an ethnic point of view it belonged to neither. The remediation of photography is not only intended to create an illusion of reality, usually attributed to photography by virtue of its supposedly indexical nature, but also to problematize those moments in private or public history of which there exist no photographic traces, but which need, nevertheless, to be recovered.

Multiple Views of the Metropolis. The New York of Jakob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz in John Reed’s Poetic and Writings

Marzia Dati — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I investigate how John Reed's poetics and narrative of the city represents the perfect blend of the perceptions of Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz of New York. The metropolis seen from "below" (the poverty in the slums) and from "above" (the verticality and dynamism of skyscrapers) as two systems of space that emphasised the tremendous impact New York had in photography and literature in the early twentieth century. Both J. Riis and A. Stieglitz managed to capture the “below” and the “above” of the metropolis that is also perfectly expressed in the movie Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang: a dystopian city where the wealthy entrepreneurs, who rule the city, from the height of the skyscrapers banish the working class to work in the underground. In How the Other Half Lives: Study among the tenements of New York(1890) Riis describes and show through his photographs the awful conditions of the old and new immigrants settled in New York, his camera sneaks into the slums and the sweatshops of the Low East Side of New York revealing an infernal underworld made up of poverty and degradation; on the other hand Stieglitz, in most of his photos, points his camera to the heights of the skyscrapers which, like gothic cathedrals, tower to the sky as the harbingers of a radiant future. This dichotomy is found in John Reed’s poems and in some relevant articles published in the radical newspapers of his time. Reed as a young poet and journalist arrived in New York in 1911 and was literally captured by the city: new spaces, new perspectives opened before his eyes but also a world of suffering. Through the analysis of the poems The Foundation of a Skyscraper (1911), A Hymn to Manhattan (1913), his long poem America, 1918 (1918) and the article Immigrants (1911), I will try to highlight how the two photographers’ visions of New York merged together in John Reed’s works, and to shed light on tight relation between literature and photography.