Napis (Dec 2023)
„Zagapianie się” – na styku literatury i fotografii. Dzień na ziemi… Michała Pawła Markowskiego
Abstract
The article is dedicated to the discussion of Dzień na ziemi [A Day on Earth] by Michał Paweł Markowski, a book consisting, according to the author, of closely related parts: a fragment of novel prose, an essay on travel, and a collection of photographs. The spirit of the work is therefore one of an experimental lyrical-visual whole, with non-apparent rules on how it should be read. At the same time, it fits into the long tradition of iconotextual syncretism, though simultaneously, the presence of photographs determines its character. The often-problematised point of a photographic image, situating a photograph in the, impossible to reconcile, opposition of document and curated work of art, is further complicated in the work by Markowski due to the decision made by the author, who labelled all elements of his piece as ‘prose’, while accentuating their narrative aspect at the same time. Although photography is not the medium of epic, its textual contextualisations release narrative mechanisms, placing the task of rendering the non-uniform textual-visual material cohesive onto the reader. The author of the study aims at analysing the way in which photography functions in the artistic whole created by Markowski. Photographs are present in the work in many ways: on a material level as an image embedded in the text, on a textual level as a story of the author of the picture, on a meta-level as an object of reflection, but also in an autonomous aspect, as a photography cycle, as well as commentary on the text and an element of the book’s visual design. The article analyses the mutual relations between word and image, interpretative procedures leading in different directions, as well as photographic-textual addenda and dialogue.
