Modernism and the Mediated Face: The Role of Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf: The increased circulation of portrait photographs in the modernist day brought about a new way of seeing the human face. Portrait photographs allowed for close study of faces without the presence of the sitter and produced a remarkable love of the medium. In the writings of Proust, Kafka, and Woolf, we find numerous scenes in which the characters collect, behold, and cherish portrait photographs. Yet at the same time, these writers highlight the difficulty of reading faces, the problem of the unreturned gaze, and the challenge of living with ghost-like doubles.
This talk will discuss the ambivalent responses to portrait photographs in modernist literature, emphasizing the emotional and relational aspects of the medium. The aim is to understand how the modernist generation learned to live with technical images and mediated faces, and, more broadly, to consider how the increased circulation of portrait photographs transformed human relations and the relation between the private and the public spheres. Finally, the talk discusses how the modernists’ ways of living with technical images and mediated faces both resemble and are different from our mediated lives today.
Marit Grøtta’s book Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion was published with Edinburgh University Press in March 2024.
Marit Grøtta is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (Bloomsbury, 2015) and numerous articles on modernist literature, including "At the Door of the Theater: Kafka's Oklahama Theater and the Nature Theater Movement" (New German Critique 142, 2021) and “Showing Seeing: The Study of Faces and Portrait Photographs in Virginia Woolf’s Early Novels” (Journal of Modernist Literature 45, 2022).