Among other things, I am an avid amateur photographer and follow a number of photography educators on social media. Periodically, they solicit their followers for suggestions to expand their course reading lists. They want to move beyond the usual suspects. By “usual suspects” I mean writers like Susan Sontag (On Photography), Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida), and more recently Geoff Dyer (The Ongoing Moment). Typically, followers suggest young academics who offer heavily footnoted reflections on the craft that are grounded in the social sciences. While I’m sure these suggestions are helpful, I find it more fruitful to approach the craft from a literary perspective. In particular, I’m interested in how photography appears in novels (e.g. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, or Michael Redhill’s Consolation) and in poetry (e.g. Steven Heighton’s The Patient Frame, or Eve Joseph’s Quarrels), and in short fiction.
To date, my photography-in-short-fiction syllabus has been a bit thin. But Rawi Hage’s Scotiabank Giller Prize nominated short fiction collection, Stray Dogs, goes a long way to remedy that gap. Of the 11 stories in his collection, all but 2 include the word photograph or photography. Of the remainder, only 2 treat the appearance of the word photograph or photography as incidental to the story. In other words, 7 of his 11 stories depend upon the craft of photography and couldn’t exist without it.
So, for example, in his opening story “The Iconoclast”, a man on a writing residency in Berlin befriends an “erstwhile photographer” named Lukas and his wife Hannah. At a party hosted by the couple, a pretentious man who resembles Karl Marx questions the writer who responds in turn with mocking pseudo-intellectual tidbits until he states that his “work dealt with how photographic images appear in literature.” There is an obviously meta quality to the statement. (It reminds me of the routine I follow whenever I go out on a photo walk: I step into one of my building’s mirrored elevators and try to photograph the infinite regress of my own reflection photographing my own reflection curving away from me in either direction.) However, because the character delivers the statement in an ironic mocking tone, it’s hard to know whether we should takes seriously his concern in the context of the story in which it appears.
The narrator invites Lukas to join him at a photography conference in Beirut where he is delivering a paper on the visual elements which appear at the end of the James Joyce story, “The Dead.” Naturally, the paper relies on the work of the “usual suspects,” in particular drawing on Camera Lucida to support ideas about ephemerality. The narrator is a hyper-intellectual overthinker who wonders if maybe his observations about photography haven’t more to do with the ephemerality of the self and, moving on from there, about the ephemerality of the image of the self. While the narrator is twisting himself into knots, his photographer friend finds a woman in Beirut and breaks up with Hannah. She recounts how Lukas converted to another religion (suggesting the Protestant break with Roman Catholicism which is the source of the word “iconoclast”), tore up his image archive, and burned all his photography books. And when he confronted Hannah, he “launched into a rant about class, imperialism and the role of the image in world culture” and tore up all her photographs too, all except a single photograph she had kept of Lukas, Hannah, and the narrator.
When the narrator asks what Hannah will do now, she answers that she will return to Hamburg to care for her dying father. Curiously, she adds: “I have to see my father’s image once more.” We make images as if to lend permanency to our otherwise fleeting experiences, but even our image-making is one more fleeting experience. Futile gestures, of course. It turns out we don’t need iconoclasm; life (and death) will take care of that for us.
Framing the book is the final story, “The Colour of Trees”, featuring James Aesthia, recently retired from Concordia University, who had lectured for 40 years on an “obscure branch of Ethics and Aesthetics—using a course title he secretly loved for the confusion caused by its closeness to his own surname.” He settles in his late wife’s family cottage where he takes daily walks to the clifftops overlooking the valley below. Soon, he adopts a cane, not out of physical need, but to project a particular image of himself. As we accompany him on his walks, we have glimpses of his mind at work and find that, like the narrator of “The Iconoclast”, he is a hyper-intellectual overthinker who offers up insights like this: “How destructive and alienating, he thought, was that dialectical relation between the inner world of the self and the outer self of the world.”
While out on one of his walks, he watches as two teenagers take a selfie at the cliff’s edge and tumble to their deaths. Traumatized by this tragedy, he holes himself up in his cottage for months, muttering to himself about “the self” and “the treachery of it all.” In the new year, he emerges from his seclusion and begins to meet the groups of tourists who like to visit the clifftops and take photos. He talks to the tourists in his hyper-intellectualized way and offers to photograph the visitors while, at the same time, urging them to step closer to the camera and away from the edge of the cliff. In time, his talks are less like amiable chats and more like pedantic harangues:
These cameras of yours, these manifestations of our fraught relation to technology and the mechanization of the world, these deadly little devices, should be abandoned. …The gaze within should contain no image of the outer world, but bear only a true reflection of the self, of what is always there, not a superficial overview of the self, but the self in all its depths.
He becomes increasingly cantankerous, refusing to return phones after he has taken photos and threatening people with his cane. Eventually, authorities commit him to a psychiatric facility where he insists on being addressed as Professor Heidegger.
Like depth of field, these two stories set the outer limits for the range of concerns that Rawi Hage plays with in his collection. Between these limits, we have, for example, the collection’s titular piece, “Stray Dogs,” about Samir who defies his more practically minded parents by studying philosophy and writing a thesis on photography. He is invited to a Japanese photography conference to present his “two dogs” paper on dog images by the photographers Daido Moriyama and Josef Koudelka. In a familiar pattern, hyper-intellectualized overthinking runs up against life’s more pragmatic concerns:
He was pleased by his ability to simultaneously read Kant, await food, watch wrestling, and contemplate the link between the three. In the end, the Kantian problem of transcendence and perception was solved through the secretion of saliva in his mouth upon hearing the doorbell rung by the pizza man.
Or we have “The Whistle” where a youth persuades his cousin to drive with him around the streets of Beirut trying to capture on film “the decisive moment” before a falling bomb explodes. I’m not sure this is what Henri Cartier-Bresson had in mind when he coined the phrase, but when the streets have been reduced to rubble, the practice of street photography assumes a different meaning.
In “The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse”, Sophia Loren visits Giuseppe Cassina, a failed photographer living with his mother in Montreal, and she leaves him with cash and one of her head shots. Giuseppe copies the head shot and passes it off as his own work in an effort to resurrect his studio business. But central to this story is a more important copy: Giuseppe bears a remarkable resemblance to Benito Mussolini. It turns out his mother was an anti-fascist who got a little too close to Il Duce and ended up bearing him a son, Giuseppe. (Sophia Loren’s sister married Mussolini’s legitimate son, in case you were wondering about the connection.) Eventually, Giuseppe finds himself in Predappio, forced by an unscrupulous shop owner to wear military garb and pose as Il Duce for photographs with tourists. (To learn more about Predappio and its fascist shops, I commend the October 7th, 2022 episode of the CBC podcast, Nothing Is Foreign.)
Or there’s “Instructions for the Dance.” Anatol escapes Cold War Europe for Winnipeg where he meets and marries Ewa. They settle in Montreal where Anatol begins to work as assistant to a wedding photographer. Because Anatol is dynamic and original in his approach, he soon outshines his employer and decides to set out on his own. However, he lacks one important skill; he has no idea how to run a business and finds himself indebted to a loan shark. To clear his debt, he agrees to shoot the wedding of a mobster’s daughter. It’s not the sort of shooting one expects in connection with mobsters, but maybe no less violent.
Finally, we have “The Duplicates.” Basilidis Al Awad works for the library at McGill University making archival photographs of ancient texts. While duplicating a document on loan from the Vatican, Basilidis notices on the negative that the name Jesus has been replaced by Simon Magus. He examines the original manuscript and finds the name Jesus where it should be. Similarly, the print displays the correct name even though it was made from the corrupted negative. As an experiment, he copies the negative and finds that the name Jesus has been replaced by Waraqa Ibn Nawfal. Replicating the experiment produces a negative with his own name, and finally a blank space with no name at all. The story offers a meditation upon the way we privilege, maybe even fetishize, the original over the duplicate, an issue made more pressing in the age of perfect digital duplication and NFTs.
Photography and related concerns around duplication, memory, time, and permanence are not the only concerns we find in Rawi Hage’s short story collection. However, these concerns do provide us with a useful (ahem) lens through which we can view his writing. Whatever perspective you adopt in your approach to his writing, I have no doubt you will find it entertaining and richly rewarding.
Buy Stray Dogs, by Rawi Hage.