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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Fall/Winter 1998, Volume 25, No.2 The Fotonovela Guest Editor: Jane Levy Reed Table of Contents • In This Issue • $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart] table of contents 1. In This Issue 4. The Fotonovela by Jane Levy Reed 6. Stephen Callis, Leslie Ernst, Ruben Ortiz Torres Portfolio 7. Harry Gamboa Jr Portfolio 8. Grand Hotel A Grammar Book for Love Dreams of Social Mobility by Contardo Calligaris 10. Richard S. Zoller Portfolio 11. Fotonovela Diagnosis: Comatose by M.A. Eugenia Chellet 13. Lourdes Grobet Portfolio 14. Image and Language by Olivier Richon 16. Xavier Lambours, Claudia Jaguaribe, Suky Best Portfolio 17. Fotonovella Bibliography 18. Exhibition Review by Dore Bowen Exhibition at Capp Street Project Gary Hill’s 23:59:59:29-The Storyteller’s Room 20. In the Gallery Recent Exhibitions at SF Camerawork 24. Book Review by Diane Zuliani PhotoWork(s) in Progress: Constructing Identity Edited by Linda Roodenburg 26. Books Received and Noted 28. Books Received in this issue The fotonovela* is a genre of photo-based narrative familiar to popular audiences outside the U.S. but only now gaining attention in Western art circles. Increasingly, these publications are being used as material by artists seeking alternatives to the static, single-image, object-based paradigm of traditional photography. In their original form, fotonovelas offer a refreshingly accessible, entertaining, passionate rendering of human relations, even as they betray culturally specific values and attitudes that may seem foreign to viewers outside their intended readership. This issue of Camerawork examines the history and current status of the fotonovela and related narrative strategies, while sketching some of the contexts from which they have arisen. It is published in conjunction with Camerawork's exhibition The Fotonovela, on view from October 16 to November 21, 1998. As guest editor, I discuss in my essay the social history of the genre since the nineteenth century as an introduction to contemporary manifestations in both Europe and the Americas. My text argues for an interrelationship between the fotonovela and other aspects of popular culture, such as soap operas and cinema. Contardo Calligaris’s personal meditation on the form begins with his autobiographical encounter as a boy in Italy with one low-brow example he found in his parents’ bedroom. Eugenia Chellet focuses on the development of fotonovelas in her native Mexico and laments what she sees as the decline of this once-vital cultural form. In a more abstract mood, artist Olivier Richon investigates the larger field of photo/text narratives into which such forms might be placed: Richon goes back to Roland Barthes’s canonical writings on the visual and linguistic rhetoric, in the service of understanding certain critical cultural mythologies. These essays, and the illustrations that accompany them, demonstrate for us the extraordinary potential the fotonovela provides for invigorating photographic practice and the vitality inherent in cross-cultural exploration of other uses of the medium. Jane Levy Reed *Fotonovela is the Spanish spelling for the term and will be used throughout this issue. home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 1999. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.