Introduction: Photographic Interventions

Since the publication in 1989 of Poetics Today’s double issue “Art and Literature” (10:1 and 10:2), as well as the special issue devoted to “Lessing’s Laokoon: Context and Reception” ten years later (20:2), the multiple and varying relations of the visual and the verbal have become key issues within the humanities in general and in the formation of new inter-, multi-, or transdisciplinary fields of study in particular. Many theorists have positioned themselves against Lessing’s distinction between the verbal as a temporal art and the visual as a spatial art: instead, they accentuate the similarities between word and image and, hence, renounce the plurality of the arts. As early as 1970, Roland Barthes (1970: 7) had urged his readers