PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

University College of the Cariboo’s associate professors, Will
Garrett-Petts, Chair of Journalism, and Donald Lawrence, Chair of Visual
and Performing Arts, have combined their talents and interests in the
literary and visual arts to create a distinctive approach to the
elucidation and teaching of “an integrated span of literacies.”
Their book, which covers everything from design and typesetting to
content and illustrations, is an attempt to achieve a “third text,”
or “Third Space,” in which “the narrative impulse disrupts the
frozen moment of high modernism.” In building their case, the authors
cite numerous essayists, critics, theorists, novelists, short-story
writers, educators, visual artists, curators, gallery directors,
photographers, and poets from their extensive works-cited list and
general index. Among the book’s illustrations and photographs are 14
color plates from the Kamloops Art Gallery exhibition “PhotoGraphic
Encounters.”

In presenting their arguments for “‘a new vernacular’ of prose
pictures and visual fictions,” the authors have produced eight
well-documented chapters that explore the boundaries and contexts of
contending literacies and literacy narratives; the “Third Space”
framework as a construct for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale;
George Bowering’s work as an example of postmodern literacy narrative;
concepts of the “new vernacular”; the ways in which Michael
Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Fred Douglas’s
Crossfade support their theories; artists’ books such as diaries,
journals, family albums, and scrapbooks; a postmodern aesthetic as
exhibited in Robert Kroetsch’s “vernacular interrogation of
visual/verbal boundaries”; and the importance of the “vernacular”
in the creation, interpretation, and experience of art. This book will
be of interest to artists, writers, educators, and critics concerned
with theoretical concepts of written and visual communications.