“We are looking at the photograph”: an Ekphrasis of an Iconic Press Photograph in Péter Farkas’ Short Novel Entitled “Creature”

Abstract

Instead of merely passively profiting from the possibilities offered by the current flood of images and the relatively easy digital access to them, ekphrases tend to take an active role in the understanding or even canonization of various phenomena of visual culture by means of meaning production and meaning modification or the problematization of spectator practices and offer a metapicture of the performance of the viewer’s gaze and the scopic regime that influences it. Analysing ekphrases thus would mean to pose aesthetic, medial – or in some cases, ethical – questions about visual representations and their ekphrastic wordings, and to examine whether the respective ekphrasis reinforces existing dominant or conventional ways of seeing or calls them into question.
Ekphrases that refer to an existing iconic press photograph that documents a historical event or a famous personality may attract sensitive cultural, aesthetic and ethical questions such as: How can a writer represent or re-enact a photographically captured moment from the past when not being witness to the respective event itself? What types of narrative techniques, viewpoints and framing devices does an ekphrasis use when approaching an abject or traumatic photograph? How can an ekphrasis engage with the suffering of others?
My paper addresses these questions via the case study of Péter Farkas’s Creature. The Hungarian writer’s short novel includes an ekphrastic response to James Nachtwey’s photograph Famine Victim in a Feeding Center that documents a Sudanese victim of the 1993 famine, while it incorporates some details from Kevin Carter’s The Vulture and the Little Girl (1993) as well.