Photographic Archives and Caption Writing in 21st Century Mexican Fiction: Mario Bellatin, Valeria Luiselli, Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz

• In Event: Textos híbridos: transmedialidad, materialidades y ensamblajes

Abstract

Since every image in the vast digital archive circulating in phones and computers is susceptible to written commentary, caption writing is a daily habit in our so-called visual age. Captions have increasingly become productive spaces for fiction—they do not just contribute to, but can also falsify, mock, appropriate and play with the indexical truth claim of photography. Thus, whereas in 1973 Sontag could say that, “The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth,” in 2003 she writes: “Alter the caption, and [the same image] could be used and reused.”
In this talk, I will analyze three contemporary Mexican authors that mine the photographic archive to explore the creative possibilities of caption writing. I will begin by looking at Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka. Una nariz de ficción (2001), in which the written commentary on photographic images blur reality and fiction. I will then present Luiselli’s La historia de mis dientes (2014) where, in a similar avant-gardistic experiment, web images taken from googlemaps are captioned by “literary” quotes. Finally, I will refer to Bojórquez Vértiz’s short-story “El Interleph” (2015), where images are present as blank spaces in picture frames, thus only accessible to the reader as imagined representations of ekphrastic verbal descriptions. I will argue that by introducing in their fiction various tensions between verbal and visual signs, these authors engage in contemporary versions of Baroque conceptista experiments, unsettling readers/viewers into forming what Gracián called “acts of understanding.”

Author

• Martin L Gaspar, Bryn Mawr College