Among the authors and publishers who will be present at this 49th edition, Gregory Jarry of Poitevine Flblb editions. He actively defends the photo novel, since the creation of Flblb twenty years ago. He even decreed that 2022 should be dedicated to him.
The photo-novel, a mode of expression in its own right The FIBD, the Angoulême international comic strip festival will take place from March 17 to 20. The meeting has been postponed due to the pandemic but it will take place and that’s good, comic book enthusiasts have not been able to enjoy it in 2021, the event having been canceled.
The photo-novel made its appearance at the end of the 19th century and is defined as “an unpublished novel illustrated by photography from nature”. But it will know its golden age in the post-war period in Italy, while losing its letters of nobility with the arrival of a genre called “in rose water” in magazines called ” feminine”.
Since then, authors have been trying to restore the image of this mode of expression where everything has to be created. At the start of the 1980s, authors such as Jean Teulé or Gébé designed works that are now being republished by Flblb. The publishing house wants to promote this form of writing and actively supports the authors.
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Grégory Jarry, co-founder of Flblb, wrote a pamphlet “Debout le roman-photo”, to demonstrate that this style offers infinite, original possibilities without any references.
Everything remains to be created, everything is surprising, since it had never been shown before, it’s an enormous luxury to be able to invent everything.
Grégory Jarry, co-founder of the Flblb publishing house
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And if the links with the comic strip are obvious, such as the narration, the bubbles, the boxes, the text added in or under the image, the photo novel requires a completely different technique. Photography, of course, is the main tool.
Several solutions are available to the author. He can imagine his entire story upstream and plan shootings. Xavier Courteix, for example, before taking pictures to tell a story, knew what he wanted to talk about. He wrote a science fiction novel in which his characters had cameras built into their eyes. He contacted an eye clinic where a surgeon agreed to let him take pictures of the operating room and the simulation of the operations. The images are therefore real but tell a fictional story.
Gregory Jarry used a different method. In one of his works, he examines the question of presidential elections. He photographed sequences with made-up candidates and he wrote and designed his sequences afterwards, with the material he had. He himself is a comic book author, which is not the case for all photo-novel authors.
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Julie Chapallaz is a scenographer and works with various theaters such as the Paris Opera. She does not practice narrative arts but she wanted to tell a story. After hearing Grégoire Jarry talk about the world of the photo-novel on the radio, she got in touch with him and started her project “the deflagration of the bushes”. She had to adapt what she had in her head to the real world. In particular, she went to take photos of bears in a park in the Jura on several occasions. She works with models or collages that she adds to the photos of her characters. The glasses, themselves, are not real. But the result is stunning.
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The pioneers For Grégoire Jarry, the fact of discovering talents in a technique that is little used today is like a challenge and gives him real pleasure: “I meet people who are a bit crazy and who want to make photo novels and who have ideas baroque”. He would like to be able to organize an exhibition on the occasion of the comic strip festival to make known this mode of expression and likes to dream of the participation of stars in future novels, why not around the Cannes festival.
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