Finding Purpose in the Photographs of Others: Ransom Riggs and Isabelle Monnin

Abstract

In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) and Les Gens dans l’enveloppe (2015) respectively, American writer Ransom Riggs and French journalist and writer Isabelle Monnin illustrate Barthes’s statement that photographs only attest to what has been. Both became “haunted” enough by pictures of others that they felt the need to give them a context. This article examines how both writers – albeit differently – integrated photographs in a dynamic photo-textual project that requires the reader-spectator’s active participation in the creation of meaning. In addition to being more complex, we will see how Monnin’s project’s transpersonal nature calls for a psychogenealogical reading.

Keywords

• photo-textuality
• protophotograph
• allo-portrait
• psychogenealogy
• Monnin (Isabelle)
• Riggs (Ransom)