1900 fiction and photography: Focus on two publishing houses, Nilsson/PerLamm and the Offenstadt Brothers

Over sixty photographically-illustrated novels were printed over a period o f ten years either side of 1900 by two publishers capitalising on the ease and economy of half-tone reproduction. Many writers interviewed at the time spoke out against this intrusion of the "documentary" and the "anti-artist ic" in the novel (survey carried out by A. Ibels for Le Mercure de France, 1898), and few collaborators were able successfully to integrate the images into their texts. Yet Jean Lorrain, in La Dame turque, drew on their perce ivably melancholy nature, equating them with the mental images of an ideali sed women in the mind of his hero. And in Willy's En bombe, the author hims elf posed in a self-consciously voyeuristic novel that satirises the typica l Nilsson reader. Taken as a whole, these semi-pornographic fictions, which arrived on the market at a period when women "increasingly fail[ed] to mar ry" (H. James), are a witness to a failure both to seriously address women' s emancipation, and to conceive of photography as a work of pure imaginatio n. Bibliography.