It is a classic metaphor in photography: Medusa, who petrifies the subject she looks at. In Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida ), this petrification extends from the photographed subject to the viewer of the photograph: “There is no escape. I suffer, motionless. […] I cannot transform my grief, I cannot let my gaze drift.” A medium of mourning, photography is also a medium of desire, which escapes petrification and sets everything in motion again. Between freeze frame and drift or liberating escape, photography appears in literature as a privileged medium of what Elias Canetti called the metamorphosis of flight, which can be seen at work in the first novel by contemporary German author Judith Schalansky, Blau steht dir nicht : Matrosenroman (Blue Doesn’t Suit You)(2008), which has just been published in French translation.

Karine Winkelvoss is a professor of German literature at the University of Rouen Normandy. Her work focuses on literature and the visual arts, literature and cultural studies, and questions of affect and memory. Her publications include Rilke, la pensée des yeux (Rilke, the thought of the eyes) (preface by Georges Didi-Huberman), Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004; Rainer Maria Rilke, Belin, 2006; W. G. Sebald, l’économie du pathos (W. G. Sebald, The Economy of Pathos), Classiques Garnier, 2021.

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