Last year’s exhibition Roman-Photo, created for the MUCEM of Marseille, has travelled to Belgium. It successfully opened on Saturday May 25th 2019, at the Photography Museum of Charleroi, where it will be possible to visit it all summer long until September 22nd 2019. Next to the beautiful pieces exhibited in Marseille, this exhibition presents an additional Belgian touch. Visitors will be able to enjoy a showcase of Hubert Serra’s photonovel “Les Eaux Malefiques” in Femmes d’Aujourd’hui 1982/1983, which was shot in Bruges. Belgian photographer Jean-Marc Bodson made a photo-reportage of the shooting of the photonovel and his original black and white photographs are exposed next to the colour
Looking for an entertaining and stimulating read? Jan Baetens' latest book The Film Photonovel: A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations is finally available! https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/baetens-the-film-photonovel "Discarded by archivists and disregarded by scholars despite its cultural impact on post–World War II Europe, the film photonovel represents a unique crossroads. This hybrid medium presented popular films in a magazine format that joined film stills or set pictures with captions and dialogue balloons to re-create a cinematic story, producing a tremendously popular blend of cinema and text that supported more than two dozen weekly or monthly publications. Illuminating a lon
There is quite a lot of interest in how to produce the visual aspects of the photonovel (casting, mise en scène, shooting, layout), but most “how to do” documents pay little attention to the verbal dimensions of it, as if scenario and dialogues were less significant to the impact of a story. All practitioners do know, however, that the art of storytelling and that of filling the captions and speech balloons in the appropriate way are also key to the success of a photonovel. And given the small size of the production teams, good storytellers have to know also how to make the characters talk. Since many popular – that is, commercial – photonovels are either signed by pseudonyms or not credited
