Picturing Ourselves. Photography & Autobiography.

[from the intro]
"Over the past 2 decades, an essential question has been debated among scholars of autobiography: can we "touch the world" in writing? Can an autobiographical text refer to a subject outside the text? Does a self create its autobiography, or does an autobiography create its self? A parallel and intimately related discussion explores the relationship of photography to the world. Are photographs evidence of the existence of things or people in the world? Or are they constructions, manipulable and manipulative, masquerading as fact? The book explores the intersection of these two debates - the point at which photographs enter the autobiographical act."
Chapters :
1. Illumination and Obfuscation: Mark Twain's Photographic Autobiography ;
2. Photographing the Soul: August Strindberg ;
3. The Angel of History as Photographer: Walter Benjamin's "Berlin Childhood around 1900" ;
4. The Lost Photo Album of Christa Wolf's "Patterns of Childhood" ;
Conclusion / Notes / Index.