What do photographs want? Do they need any accompaniment in today's image-saturated society? Can writing inflect photography (or vice versa) in such a way that neither medium takes precedence? Or are they in constant, inexorable battle with each other? Taking nine case studies from the 1990s French-speaking world (from France, North Africa and the Caribbean), this book attempts to define the interaction between non-fictional written text (caption, essay, fragment, poem) and photographic image. Having considered three categories of 'intermediality' between text and photography - the collaborative, the self-collaborative and the retrospective - the book concludes that the dimensions of their interaction are not simple and two-fold (visuality versus/alongside textuality), but threefold and therefore 'complex'. Thus, the photo-text, as defined here, is concerned as much with orality - the demotic, the popular, the vernacular - as it is with visual and written culture. That text-image collaborations give space to the spoken, spectral traces of human discourse, suggests that the key element of the photo-text is its radical provisionality.

The journal, periodical or revue has a long and largely unexplored history. The periodical has been recognized as a site of unexpected juxtapositions and unorthodox exchanges, a source of chance discoveries. It provides a unique insight into the uneven interactions that characterize any contemporary moment and is an invaluable archive in its own right. This volume aims, through a series of focused case studies, to explore the twentieth-century periodical publication in French, offering an overview of some of its most important manifestations and providing a general reflection on this complex textual form.