"Saving the imaginary": literature and photography face to face

Abstract

If the most minimalist definition one can give to the words « art work » is « the way an imagination expresses itself », this definition was, in the second half of the 19th century, the reason why art. critics and theorists argued about the status of photography : purely objective document or potential art work. But writers and literary theorists also took part in this debate, since photography was used to illustrate novels. This article confronts the « literary imagination » and the « photographic imagination », and tries to understand the points of convergence and the points of divergence between these two kinds of imagination, through the contradictory points of view of historians, philosophers and theorists of visual arts and literature.