Can one take photographs of literature? Is it possible to see in the lens a literary description of a house, the protagonist of a novel, a landscape, a natural phenomenon? Mallarmé maintained that everything in the world exists to be photographed. According to Cartier-Bresson, taking photographs is tantamount to 'discovering the structure of the world' while Susan Sontag believed that a photograph can be also described as a quotation. This means that it may contain a cohesive literary communiqué. In order to compare a literary account with a photographic description I travelled to Szetejnie in Lithuania to document the world of Czeslaw Milosz - his Valley of the Issa; to Hanseatic Lübeck, along whose narrows streets Thomas Mann chased as a child; to Rouen - where Flaubert's home still stands; enthralled by the works of William Faulkner, I reached his legendary Rowan Oak farm... In each of these places I documented the world of the writer, his roots and sources of inspiration, at the same time comparing them with the literary works.
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