Article analyses specific moment of historical interconnection between literature and photography. The activity of national agency FSA, which was supposed to document and present to the entire society issues concerning the most economically and culturally handicapped classes, was often used as a raw material for much more advanced and complex artistic projects.
Thus lots of intriguing collaborations between photographers and writers were born and their achievements are today an important and autonomous testimony not only of a moment in social history but also an episode in the history of media and their mutual relations.
The author of the article tries to explain theoretical, political and ethical contexts of these collaborations. Seeing, speaking, even thinking with certain reservations, for as soon as we distinguish thought from speaking absolutely we are already in the order of reflection , are experiences of this kind, both irrecusable and enigmatic. Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2. There is no single, all-encompassing and permanently valid model of the mutual relationship between language and the visual, which is why all of the many theoretical attempts at formulating such a connection are forever doomed to failure, however impressive the conceptual constructs supporting such a relationship may appear.
Thus there exists no such thing as a relationship or connection between text and image that would not at once be the source and effect of a specific historical moment, a moment that not only links the two media in a unitary configuration, but would also define a certain stage in their historical development, their reciprocal association, and the manner in which they are anchored in reality.
The relationship between photography and literature should also be regarded as a strand in the broad history of these intimate connections between the image and the word. Their development has also been fed by moments of particular intensification that sometimes open up new and unknown vistas for potential juxtapositions. Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect of that moment must be chosen.
