The photonovel: a genre of photodocumentalism or an unstable form of the author's creative expression?

The article considers the phenomenon of the photonovel as a genre of Russian photodocumentalism. The brief history of its origin is analysed, the grounds for formali-sation and classification as a genre of photodocumentalism are given. The structural and content features of this laconic form of creating a documentary image are considered. The author analyses the ways of creating a documentary image. A photonovel as a work of documentary is a single object. Here, a photo without a text does not express a complete meaning, and a text without a photo also is not fully informative. A photonovel is not about events, because events in it remain behind the text. Events, anonymously, are isolated in the shot. Events as information, as material for reporting are not important. The very fact that a photograph depicts a real image, the gestalt of which is identical to the gestalt created by the author in the text, forms both the event and the documentary core of the work. Moreover, in the viewer's opinion, both ge-stalts harmoniously merge into a single holistic image. This is the case when a photograph taken from the content will lose its documentary and, perhaps, even aesthetic meaning. And a seized text, without a photograph, becomes an artifact of fiction, loosing the documentary and, therefore, journalistic sense. The photonovel is a unique and somewhat separate format. In its subject-compositional, stylistic and aesthetic nature this is the creative manner of the convergent completion of a gestalt. Here the author organically combines a photo as a document and an artistic text into a whole image. This is not typical for fiction (novels, stories). This is not typical for artistic and journalistic genres in the forms that have developed in practice. Therefore, the photonovel should be regarded as an artistic work on the stylisation of the text, according to architectonics, but documentary in its content. The photonovel can be defined as an artistic-documentary work. That is, the photonovel seems to us as a laconic narrative, the authenticity of which is "documented" in a photo. Such a contextual-visual fusion as a form and method of creating images opens a wide scope for creativity. Even a superficial analysis of the works published under the heading "Photonovel" in books, on websites and in Internet versions of publications makes it possible to compile a preliminary typology of this form of creativity as a genre of photodocumentalism. Figuratively speaking, a profound inventory of the creative "economy" and the grounds for the current structural forma-lisation and classification of the photonovel as a genre of photodocumentalism must obviously be done on the existing collection basis.

Keywords

Authors

References