By Eivind Torgersen
Translated by Kine Bjørnstad Petersen using GPT UiO

The prominent authors Proust, Kafka, and Woolf all wrote about portraits in the early 1900s. The new images generated both frustration and passion, argues Professor Marit Grøtta in a new book.

The proliferation of portrait photography in the latter half of the 19th century was a minor media revolution that is difficult to comprehend today. By the early 1900s, they had become part of everyday life – they were enclosed in letters between lovers and exchanged among friends.

Physical pictures. Not the endless stream of digital images we are exposed to on social media and other digital platforms.

“The images that surround us today are not chosen by us. It's the media companies and algorithms that bombard us with them, and we can't touch them,” says Marit Grøtta, Professor of literature at the University of Oslo.

“I believe we develop a less personal relationship to images in a digital culture,” says the literary scholar who recently published the book Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion.

In the book, she closely examines how portrait photography plays a role in the texts of authors Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf.

“There was a media shift in the decades before and after the year 1900, which these authors reflect upon. This was a transitional period, where photographs also began to appear in newspapers and magazines, changing the boundaries between the private and the public.”

“Proust, Kafka, and Woolf engaged with this in their daily lives, and they are the first authors to describe the encounter with portrait photographs in a detailed manner,” says Grøtta.

The images stirred strong emotions
Grøtta has read novels, short stories, diaries, and letters in which the authors or their characters relate to photographs of other people.

“It is not primarily the portrait photographs that are described, but the characters' relationships to them. They describe many scenes where characters immerse themselves in a portrait photograph of a person to whom they have some form of relationship and become emotionally engaged with the image itself,” she explains.

“There are many emotions at play here – both passion and frustration – and this also leads to a reflection on the workings of images,” says Grøtta.

It was not just the media landscape that was changing at this time. The perception of humans and relationships between people was also evolving.

“After Freud, we better understand how much we do not have access to in other people and how much plays out in and behind a face.”

The portrait photograph makes it possible to study some of this.

“Both Proust, Kafka, and Woolf describe how human relationships change when faces begin to circulate independently and can be studied without a person's physical presence.”

Kafka dissatisfied with portrait of his fiancée
Kafka, for instance, describes how he reacts to a photograph he received from his fiancée, Felice Bauer.

“He describes an enormous frustration that her gaze does not meet his. He says it is as if she deliberately turns away. She always averts her gaze, no matter how he turns the photograph. He must settle for kissing the photograph instead of meeting her gaze,” Grøtta explains.

She believes that these types of descriptions and reflections are important sources to understand the profound change that portrait photography represented in their time.

“It almost seems as if these authors attribute something supernatural to the portrait photographs. It is not just a picture, but a kind of double. The portrait photograph gives a sense of presence, that the person is there, but at the same time a sense of absence.”

“It is an ambivalence that I think we can still feel today, even though we are much more seasoned media consumers,” says Grøtta.

Writing as images become more widespread
Portrait photographs play different roles for the three authors. Grøtta summarises by saying that Proust is concerned with truth, Kafka with power, while for Woolf it is about sympathy.

“In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the main character is focused on finding a deeper truth in the image. He distinguishes between public images of actors, which appear false, and more genuine, private images which are more authentic. But which maybe do not fully deliver either.”

The literature professor notes that Kafka is concerned with power on several levels.

“He particularly depicts family photographs and how the main characters are, in a way, at their mercy. The images hold the main characters in a submissive role.”

Woolf, on the other hand, criticises the 19th-century conventions for portraits.

“She believes they glorify great men, personality, and power. But for Woolf, it is also about how sympathy can arise through images and through faces.”

The authors highlight different aspects, but all write during a transitional period where images are becoming more and more prevalent.

“It says something about how great these authors are that they manage to portray the change that the proliferation of photography entails, without this being a main focus for them,” Grøtta says.

Literature shows how media affect us
Proust, Kafka, and Woolf manage to capture everyday experiences related to the technological advancements of their time. It is not surprising that contemporary authors do not describe photographs in the same way.

However, Grøtta observes an interesting trend.

“We live in a different visual culture, shaped by today's media. And we have become very accustomed to 'mediated faces,' so we do not think much about how they affect us,” she says.

“But there is a tendency in contemporary literature where authors reflect on personal stories based on analogue photographs.”

She primarily thinks of the French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux but also mentions Linn Ullmann.

“But it is nevertheless in a different manner than Proust, Kafka, and Woolf. Where they described how one relates to their contemporaries through portrait photographs, today's authors are more inclined to delve into memory and history,” Grøtta says.

Grøtta believes that the three authors Proust, Kafka, and Woolf shed light on history in a way that cannot be achieved by merely studying technological and media historical development.

“Fiction gives us an understanding of how media intervene in our lifeworld and daily life. It can show how they affect our senses – and how this influences relationships between people,” she concludes.