Photography as Narrative, Aesthetic, and Document in Documentary bande dessinée: Emmanuel and François Lepage's La Lune est blanche (2014)

Photography as Narrative, Aesthetic, and Document in Documentary bande dessinée : Emmanuel and François Lepage's La Lune est blanche (2014) Margaret C. Flinn Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, Volume 2, Issue 2, Summer 2018, pp. 137-159 (Article) Published by The Ohio State University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/698078 Access provided by The Ohio State University (26 Jan 2019 03:06 GMT) Photography as Narrative, Aesthetic, and Document in Documentary bande dessinée: Emmanuel and François Lepage’s La Lune est blanche (2014) Margaret C. Flinn ABSTRACT: This article examines tensions between narrative, aesthetic, and documentary functions of photography in comics. Emmanuel and François Lepage’s La Lune est blanche (Futuropolis, 2014) furnishes a primary case study. I read La Lune est blanche alongside of Emmanuel Lepage’s other travelogue documentary bande dessinée, and in the light of the complementary publication of François Lepage’s photography in a companion work, Ombres claires (Perspectivesart9, 2014). While a certain body of scholarship has compellingly maintained that photography should be considered an integral part of comics narrative, I use La Lune est blanche to challenge those arguments for the primacy of narrative as the most useful category for understanding photography within comics. The Lepages’ work forcefully mobilizes photography’s documentary and aesthetic functions. KEYWORDS: Emmanuel Lepage, François Lepage, Étienne Davodeau, photography, bande dessinée, documentary, narrative, intermediality inks • © 2018 by The Ohio State University Press 137 Summer 2018, Vol. 2.I.2 INKS N THIS article, I examine the tension between photography as an integral part of comics narrative and photography as guarantor of the comic’s aesthetic and documentary value. My analysis of photography in Emmanuel and François Lepage’s documentary bande dessinée, La Lune est blanche [The Moon is White] (2014) details how the photographs’ documentary and aesthetic qualities coexist with their narrative integration in the comics’ storyworld.1 I argue, though, that the way that photography is positioned both within La Lune est blanche itself (in the body of the text and within the “dossier” that follows), as well as the way that the album has been distributed in tandem with a book of François Lepage’s photographs (sans drawings by Emmanuel), Ombres claires [Light shadows] (2014), emphasizes photography as a distinctive medium with potential independent documentary and aesthetic value.2 Thus, within the narrative of La Lune est blanche, the inclusion of photography emphasizes the documentary nature of the comic itself, even as it functions as part of the text’s aesthetic and narrative.3 I begin with a brief presentation of the context of La Lune est blanche in relationship to Emmanuel Lepage’s other work—notably an environmental triptych whose volumes are generically structured primarily as travelogues, but that I characterize as “environmental” insofar as a recurrent theme throughout the three volumes is the impact humans have had upon the environment.4 Then, I discuss the theoretical framework of scholarship on documentary comics and the use of photography therein, showing how the Lepage collaboration requires a certain pushing back against work that has primarily argued for seeing photography as fully integrated into comics narrative. The next two sections look specifically at Lune. First, I compare the number, size, and placement of photographs in the text with the use of comparable panels in the triptych’s other volumes, in order to show how the large-panel photographs do or do not function in Lune the way large-panel, hand-drawn, or painted images do in Lepage’s other, similar texts. Next, I offer a close reading of a double-page spread photograph in Lune, highlighting the tensions between the narrative, aesthetic, and documentary functions of such images. I conclude the article with a brief contrapuntal discussion of another, much looser pairing of photography and comics. The case of Étienne Davodeau’s Les Ignorants/The Initiates (2011) and a book of portrait photography dedicated to Angevin vintners (one of whom is the collaborator of Davodeau in the artisanal exchange he documents in The Initiates) demonstrates that role of guarantor of value can shift based on the professional status of the artists involved.5 I EMMANUEL LEPAGE’S ENVIRONMENTAL TRIPTYCH AND ITS COMPANION VOLUMES In the early 2000s, Breton bédéiste Emmanuel Lepage published a number of travel sketchbooks (a popular and successful genre in the French publishing industry, and one in which numerous French comics artists have cross-over experience). Emmanuel’s brother, François, worked initially as a photojournalist, but increasingly in the 2010s has been exhibiting in galleries and publishing books of art photography.6 The brothers’ La Lune 138 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE est blanche is the third of what I refer to as Emmanuel Lepage’s environmental triptych.7 Each of these books, published by Futuropolis between 2011 and 2014, recounts a different journey or sojourn, and they share the particularity that they each have a more or less tightly connected companion volume that is not a bande dessinée. Emmanuel’s Voyage aux îles de la Désolation [Voyage to the Desolation Islands] chronicles a trip to the Kerguelen Islands, a sea voyage that he took along with François and journalist Caroline Britz, who together published their own book about the expedition’s boat, the Marion Dufresne.8 Un Voyage à Tchernobyl [A Voyage to Chernobyl] chronicles a stay in Ukraine, near Chernobyl, that Emmanuel was invited to undertake along with artist Gildas Chasseboeuf in order to produce Les Fleurs de Tchernobyl [The Flowers of Chernobyl], a travel sketchbook sold to benefit an association dedicated to helping the children of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.9 Finally, Emmanuel and François undertook a second journey to the French Southern and Antarctic Territories [Terres australes et antarctiques françaises, or the TAAF], this time continuing on past the Kerguelen Islands to the Dumont d’Urville Station in Antarctica, from whence they joined “le raid” [“the trek”] as novice drivers. Le raid is the overland caravan that supplies provisions for the Franco-Italian Concordia Research Station. Resulting from that trip was a “beau livre” (essentially, a coffee table book) of art photographs by François, with accompanying text that he wrote himself (published by Perspectivesart9), as well as a long-planned-for collaboration between the two brothers, La Lune est blanche. This triptych requires introduction because it is important to see from the outset that La Lune est blanche occupies a place in an intertextual network of intermedial collaborations.10 Aside from the different color palettes (unsurprisingly, Tchernobyl is dominated by greens, while the Antarctic books are dominated by blues and whites), the books share a similar overall look and narrative arc, so comparisons are useful for bringing out the nuances of each individual volume. Moreover, it is important to be clear that La Lune est blanche is situated at the crossroads of a number of genres. It is a nonfiction comic book that incorporates photography. It can reasonably be called a documentary because the text claims a privileged relationship to the historical world, and in fact “documentaire” is how the French comics website bdtheque.com11 categorizes all three volumes of the triptych.12 Like Tchernobyl and Voyages, though, Lune mobilizes a number of different types of nonfictional and fictional discourses and generic tropes: it is heavily organized by the narrative logic and themes of the travelogue and/or the chronicle (including the emphasis, and even dramatization, of certain events for narrative interest); it incorporates significant amounts of historical and pedagogical information pertaining to the exploration and establishment of the French Southern and Antarctic Territories, as well as current scientific research and the mechanics/logistics of the French Polar services; it has a thread of family drama and autobiography insofar as it self-reflexively explores the process of the brothers’ collaboration and the degree to which they do and do not interact as both artists and siblings (not to mention expedition team members) during the course of the trip. 139 INKS ON DOCUMENTARY COMICS AND THE INTERMEDIAL In Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, arguably the most important work to engage nonfiction comics in a serious and extended fashion (although her corpus is not exclusively documentary), Hillary Chute observes and bemoans the dearth of “sustained critical study on documentary comics.”13 Chute herself identifies the relationship between comics and documentary as an analogous one: The essential form of comics—its collection of frames—is relevant to its inclination to document. Documentary (as an adjective and a noun) is about the presentation of evidence. In its succession of replete frames, comics calls attention to itself, specifically, as evidence. Comics makes a reader access the unfolding of evidence in the movement of its basic grammar, by aggregating and accumulating frames of information.14 Based on this understanding of documentary comics, Chute makes the historical argument that nonfiction comics emerge “in its contemporary specificity” as a form of witnessing, “testamentary,” or testimonial comics that respond to “the shattering global conflict of World War II.”15 Her book thus culminates in a study of the “comics journalism” of Joe Sacco, as evidence of the way “comics is currently expanding [the] reach, range, and depth” of documentary.16 While this is certainly true, Chute’s own work does not in fact give other scholars much to work with in terms of considering the various modes of documentary that are deployed in this rapidly expanding field. While the historical trajectory of Chute’s argument in Disaster Drawn is both compelling and convincing, her focus on drawing (necessary in the project of asserting the power of drawing as documentary form) means that her book does not provide adequate tools to account for the stakes of a work like Emmanuel and François Lepage’s La Lune est blanche.17 Lune is decidedly not journalism (and Chute remarks that Sacco does not ever reproduce photographs and in fact only experiments with the reproduction/drawing of documents in one of his most recent works, Footnotes in Gaza). In fact, I would like to suggest that there is a radically different way that we can think of documentary and comics as analogous, and that is in how they are positioned vis-à-vis intermediality. As a way to approach this question, philosopher, historian and film theorist Jacques Rancière’s observations about documentary film are useful. In Film Fables, Rancière proposes that: We cannot think of “documentary” film as the polar opposite of “fiction” film simply because the former works with images from real daily life and archive documents about events that obviously happened, and the latter with actors who act out an invented story. The real difference between them isn’t that the documentary sides with the real against the inventions of fiction, it’s just that the 140 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE documentary instead of treating the real as an effect to be produced, treats it as a fact to be understood.18 He then continues to say that: In contrast to [the] tendentious reduction of the fictional invention to the stereotypes of the social imaginary, the fiction of memory sets its roots in the gap that separates the construction of meaning, the referential real, and the “heterogeneity” of its documents. “Documentary” cinema is a mode of fiction at once more homogenous and more complex: more homogeneous because the person who conceives the idea is also the person who makes it; more complex because it is much more likely to arrange or interlace a series of heterogeneous images.19 In essence, what Rancière highlights is that documentary filmmaking tends to be aesthetically agnostic—it is much more likely than fiction film to mix aesthetic registers: interviews, newspaper clippings, still images (and other archival documents), historical footage from various sources (including fiction films), contemporary footage, etc. This type of aesthetic heterogeneity is very much like what scholarship on Guibert, Lefèvre, and Lemercier’s Le Photographe/The Photographer has explored, but here the issue has been framed as a question of intermediality, rather than one of mixed aesthetic registers.20 Photography can be (and often is) seamlessly interwoven into comics narrative as just one of the many visual registers that can be mobilized within comics. As Nancy Pedri and Daniel Lawson have both insightfully argued, photographs are part and parcel of The Photographer’s visual rhetoric, an integral, rather than supplemental, part of the comics’ narrative structure.21 Lawson identifies this process of “remediation” or “transformational intermediality,” whereas for Pedri, it is more of a “synthetic intermediality,” to borrow two of Jens Schrötter’s very useful meta-theoretical categories discourse from his essay in Bernd Herzogenrath’s edited volume Travels in Intermedia[lity].22 Indeed, I am using “intermedial” in this essay rather than “transmedial,” because Schrötter’s essay usefully demonstrates the variability of intermediality. But generally, we can say that the tendency in scholarship on The Photographer has been to consider photographs as part of a multi-registered narrative. Much of what Pedri and Lawson have compellingly argued about The Photographer is also true of La Lune est blanche: photographs do work as part of the narrative. However, in this text the photos’ aesthetic and documentary value are easily as or more important than their narrative function. That is to say that on the aesthetic front, not only does their inclusion in large numbers contribute to the book’s overall visual style, but their composition and their relative size (as I will examine in more detail below related to double-page spreads) foreground the way they interrupt narrative flow with something else (beauty, contemplation, etc.). This is a factor not only of size (as double-page spreads always impose a different type of reading), but the stylistic shift from drawn to photographic image. Frequent redundancies between the representation of a place or object in drawn panels and the photographs do not negate the bédéiste’s hand as 141 INKS valid documentary mediation, but the shift in style calls attention to the differing mediations: camera and hand. So, while photographic panels can work for Lepage’s story-telling just like drawn panels, they are also marked as different in ways that mean their aesthetic and documentary functions take precedence over their narrative function. I will show that this is both a textual and paratextual (or intertextual) effect.23 In any case, documentary (as either an aesthetically heterogeneous or an intermedial mode of discourse) is extremely tolerant of such mixed registers in ways that fiction often is not (in such fictional works major aesthetic shifts are expected to be motivated, or to have a clear narrative function). Comics narrative, I would suggest, has the possibility of such incorporations, but tends to do so in its documentary modes much more so than in fictional ones—or at least in discernably different ways. It goes beyond the scope of this essay to prove such a claim, but it remains striking that the examples cited in the secondary literature to date on intermedial comics seem overwhelmingly to come from comics produced in a nonfictional mode. One can imagine, and indeed find, examples of both aesthetic heterogeneity and intermediality in fictional comics. For instance, one might think of the (frequent) representation of newspaper headlines, but these would, as in film, tend to be outlying cases rather than constitutive or exemplary and therefore definitional. For such an instance, I would make the analogy to literary effets de réel, and therefore the domain of realism rather than documentary, to explain such an example. Thus, I would like to suggest that, as Rancière does in the case of film, the avidity we see in documentary comics for (trans- or) intermedial forms comes as much or more from the quality of “being documentary” as it does from the quality of “being comics.” Marianne Hirsch’s seminal work on post-memory inspires Chute, as Hirsch argues that in Art Spiegelman’s Maus we can see how the confrontation between the spoken testimony of Spiegelman’s father, the photographs included in the graphic novel, and Spiegelman’s drawings “produce a more permeable and multiple text . . . that definitively [erases] any clear cut distinction between the documentary and the aesthetic.”24 But while Chute asserts that such permeability is inherent to comics “because of its gap-and-frame-form,”25 I would maintain that the category and concept of documentary as theorized by Rancière offers an alternative. Even if comics may hold the potential that Chute asserts it does, the strength of the contrasts arising from the juxtaposition of different visual registers, as prominently occurs in the intermedial work (which essentially is what Rancière posits documentary film to be), gives documentary comics an aesthetic of intermediality that exceeds that of comics in general. Moreover, I would maintain that this is an ever-fluctuating aesthetic positioning. Thus, although certain texts such as The Photographer will tolerate readings such as Pedri’s and Lawson’s that emphasize the full integration of photography within comics as a part of narrative, Lepage and Lepage’s La Lune est blanche challenges the primacy of narrative as the most useful category for understanding what photography is doing in the comics text. 142 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE BY THE NUMBERS This section considers how the number, size, and placement of the photographs in La Lune est blanche all work to underline their narrative, aesthetic, and documentary functions. At first glance, La Lune est blanche looks “just like” the other volumes of the environmental triptych, with the exception of photographs taking the place of most large-sized panels. A closer look at the numbers reveals that, in fact, there are markedly more large-sized panels in Lune. Lepage uses double-page spreads at a comparable rate across Désolation and Tchernobyl: 5% and 6% of pages, respectively. In contrast, 15% of the pages of the body of Lune are dedicated to double-page spreads, and of those, 88% are François’s photographs rather than Emmanuel’s drawings. If one includes the dossier on the Concordia research station, those numbers jump to 19% of the pages being part of double-page spreads, 95% of which are photographs. On its own, the dossier has 38% of its pages dedicated double-page photographic spreads, so double the percentage for the body of the text. Thus, in his collaboration with François, Emmanuel Lepage uses many more large format panels than usual in Lune, and he cedes an important portion of these panels to photographs, rather than hand-drawn artwork. Furthermore, the prominence of photographs within the dossier means Lepage (or the Lepages together) position photography as more closely aligned to the informative mode of documentary that characterizes the text’s dossier, as opposed to the body of the text, whose structuring narrative principal is the travelogue. Drawing is not at all precluded from having this documentary function—but Emmanuel’s contribution to the images of the dossier involve all pencil or water color portrait/sketches, of a piece with the types of portraits he sprinkles throughout all of the triptych, as well as the travel sketchbook he published with Gildas Chasseboeuf after their Chernobyl trip (see Figure 1). And indeed, the presence of such sketch work and its alignment with the dossier’s informative mode imposes the observation that a key distinction for Lepage is not between hand-drawing and camera but between an imagistic style characterized by the polish acquired in studio-completed drawings or paintings, and the temporal aspect of image “capture” characterized by the quickness of both the sketch and the camera’s shutter.30 Qualitatively, the largest format images are quite similar to those in the body of the text: they tend to show place (landscapes, exteriors of constructions/machinery) and have a similar aesthetic charge to the large landscape, seascape, and motorized equipment photographs in the body of the text. The smaller format images are more snapshot-like: there are many more images of people (including people in groups, people in interiors of the research station, see Figure 1). Indeed, the prominence of so many photographed human faces in the first pages of the dossier is almost jarring, after the body of the text where faces are far more often drawn and so many photographs are dedicated to achingly beautiful land and seascapes that seem quasi-desolate.31 The heavy use of the double-page spread photographic panel in the body of Lune emphasizes photography as an artistic practice rather than a journalistic one (in contrast to the heavy use of contact sheet images in The Photographer). Indeed, François talks 143 Table 1. Book Title Voyage aux îles de la Désolation Total pages 198 Photos Double-page spread panels Other Large format/splash Full-page panels Panels (>1/2 pg)26 “Travel sketch- book” areas (full page or otherwise)27 1 (in back matter)28 5 3 14 23 1 (in back matter) 5 0 27 3 18 in body, of which 4 photos 17 photos 3 2 non-photo (+ 11 in the dossier) (+ portraits in back matter) (+ title pgs & back matter) Un printemps à Tchernobyl 164 (+ title pgs & back matter) La Lune est blanche 225 pg body 60 total29 (This text includes a purely informative “dossier” dedicated to the Concordia research station.) 26 pg dossier 37 in body (+ title pgs & back matter) 22 in dossier 15 photos in body, 5 photos in dossier 1 (in back matter) 3 non-photo (in body) 35 non-photo FIGURE 1. Double-page spread from La Lune est blanche that shows the extensive and informative text, the rapid sketched and painted portraits of Emmanuel, and the snapshot style photographs of François that characterize the dossier. Emmanuel and François Lepage, La Lune est blanche © Futuropolis (2014), p. 234–5. INKS about this project as explicitly different from photojournalism.32 There is almost only one type of photograph incorporated in La Lune est blanche, which is “final artistic product,” as opposed to the contact sheet images used liberally in The Photographer. This means that Lepage tends to give the role of immediacy and variety more frequently to drawing (e.g., the sketch work, and portraits sur le vif, the use of different materials—pencil, ink, gouache, pastels, etc.), reserving only a singular state of polish for photos, with exception being the almost “snapshot-like” photos of the residents of the Concordia base station in the dossier. If it is clear that quantitatively, particularly when it comes to double-page spreads, François’s photographs are privileged, qualitatively, Lune arguably shows the photographs to equal or even greater aesthetic effect than François’s solo publication dedicated the journey, Les Ombres claires. The books share the same page area, but the BD is oriented vertically while the photography book is oriented horizontally. This means that the double-page spread photographs in the BD are by far the largest images present on any given page. Only once during the body of his text does François have a single image fill two pages. It is a picture of the raid strung along the horizon at the top of the image, so clearly there was a need to emphasize the length of the caravan, strung across the flat, snowy landscape. François does use many full-page photos in Les Ombres Claires, and the very few (eight) that bleed across the gutter to cover about 20–30% of the facing page, but he also fills single pages with anywhere from one to nine very small images in a series, liberally using white space around both small images and widely varying sized blocks of text. So, although the large-format photos in Lune are somewhat marred by the gutter, they consistently allow for a more immersive or impactful visual experience, as they stand out from their context. While I do not want to suggest that bigger is necessarily better, what Emmanuel Lepage does fairly consistently across the triptych is use the double-page spread dedicated to a single image as a punctuating moment, a moment of significant (visual: aesthetic and documentary) impact. Neither the photographic and hand-drawn double-pages of Lune are an exception to this. Such use of the double-page spread is typically tied to some narrative motivation: for example, a spectacularly colored double-page spread of hundreds of penguins in Désolation (see Figure 2).33 Somewhat mysterious noises and smells represented on the previous page anticipate the presence of the multitude of penguins on this double-page spread. The fore- and middle-ground of the double-page image are crammed full of birds, making them far more visually important than the humans, while a cliff wall dominates the background. The red-parka-clad François and two other expedition members are visible on the far edge of the left page, smaller than two inches tall, while the largest penguin in the foreground takes up approximately eight inches—about ¾ the height of the page. Lepage uses shifts in color and medium to underscore narrative impact as well as size: two black and white pages of smaller panels have built anticipation for the double-page by remarking upon an unidentified “pestilent odor” (represented in the drawing by swirls in the air which were no doubt invisible in real life), and, “Then,” a small 146 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE panel almost completely filled with onomatopoetic “CRAAAAA CRAAAAA CRAAAA . . .” and “PILILLI PILLILI . . .” of varying sizes.34 The final panel before the double page shows one single penguin.35 This type of positioning of a visually impactful double-page spread is perhaps the most dramatic of uses of the double-page for narrative and aesthetic affect, but it is also fair to say that this is an exemplary case of how Lepage’s double-page spreads are embedded in the text such that both narrative and aesthetic functions are emphasized. Large format (double or full page) panels that are drawn or painted share the documentary function of the photographic panels, and of the texts as a whole. One useful illustration of the underlining of the documentary comes from Tchernobyl, where Emmanuel shows himself walking in front of a ruined house in the middle of a forested landscape, wearing the protective boots, gloves and face mask to limit radiation, and carrying the eye-popping red folding stool that he and his colleague Gildas use to sit on when they draw.36 In another self-portrait panel, the protectively-garbed Emmanuel sits sketching in the Tchernobyl forest, and observes that he “nearly” forgets the protective gear and the contamination, until he drops his stick of oil pastel.37 He hesitates, then decides to abandon it (see Figure 3). These self-representations underline the “I was there” dimension of the narrative and give the reader pause insofar as the health risks posed by “being there” were alarming and potentially severe. Thus, the documentary aspect of the image, the author’s self-representation on the scene, is crucial here. What, then, do the numbers and distribution of types of photographs and drawn-sourced images tell us when comparing Lune to the other books in the triptych? How does the body and dossier of Lune itself compare? The photograph, particularly in large format panels, may be narratively integrated, but its aesthetic and documentary functions are also highlighted. And, because of the predominance of the photograph after the generic shift from travelogue to informative dossier, even images that are of great aesthetic quality are nonetheless being emphasized for their factual, real-world, indexical—in a word, documentary—value. I would not argue that photography in Lune works only as a guarantor of reality, but rather that it gives both an expanded aesthetic and documentary value to the comic—as well as being narratively integrated. FOR THE BIRDS This section considers how a single double-page photograph is situated in relationship to the narrative as articulated in drawing and text. Through this example, I will show how narrative does matter—information that helps to tells the story is furnished in the photographic panel—but at the same time, the photograph’s aesthetic and its actuality means that its documentary function far outweighs the narrative one. Near the mid-point of Lune, the participation of Emmanuel and François in the raid is in crisis. This participation was never a given and has, to this point in the story, been the subject of a fair amount of debate and discussion, eventually turning in to a major triumph or dream realized, when the expedition authorities decide the Lepages can trav- 147 FIGURE 2. Penguins on the Kerguelen Islands. Emmanuel Lepage, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation © Futuropolis (2011), p. 58–9. FIGURE 3. Emmanuel sketching in the forest of Chernobyl, wearing booties, mask, and gloves. He decides to abandon the oil pastel he accidentally drops to the forest floor, uncertain about the risk of radiation contamination. Emmanuel Lepage, Un Printemps à Tchernobyl © Futuropolis (2012), p. 109. INKS el to Concordia Research Station from Dumont d’Urville Station overland rather than by air. Due to extremely limited space, members of the caravan transport party all must drive. The brothers, however, have no experience driving heavy machinery, especially in Antarctic conditions—moreover, neither of them is a mechanic, which all of the regular drivers are. Thus, they each represent a potential liability as members of the raid team. As is often the case, the entire trip to Antarctica has been plagued with unfavorable weather conditions meaning delays at every step from the Astrolabe’s departure from Hobart, Tasmania onwards (they stop en route to resupply the Kerguelen Island research station, deposit researchers beginning their stays, and pick up researchers who are ending theirs). The brothers’ original charge included documenting the work done at Dumont d’Urville (DDU) Station, the coastal research base. The lateness of the Astrolabe’s arrival at DDU means that the convoy must leave immediately to reach Concordia within the possible travel window before the beginning of the Antarctic winter—the Astrolabe’s safe return through the ocean ice pack is also increasingly jeopardized by continued delay. These delays and their resultant disruptions provide Emmanuel with a great deal of the drama and narrative tension for the book’s script: numerous researchers have to abandon parts of their project, reconfigure their experiments to gather data at different locations than initially planned, etc. Patrice, the logistical chief of the French Antarctic Territory Adélieland is responsible for making the final decisions about who stays and who goes (either traveling as planned, returning directly, or deviating to another base). He determines that given the tight timing, having two novice drivers raises the risk factor for the convoy too much, plus if they both were to leave after such a brief stay (less than 24 hours) the activities of DDU station would be undocumented. This possibility was troubling for Patrice, since the documentation of DDU’s activities was a significant part of the French Polar Services’ interest in issuing the invitation for the Lepages to join the Antarctic expedition in the first place. Patrice’s solution is that one brother should stay at DDU while the other joins the convoy. He suggests that François should join the convoy and Emmanuel stay at the base, because the latter “can always draw from the [convoy] photographs” after the fact (134). The brothers have approximately two hours to decide how to handle the situation. They go for a walk as they discuss, and a small panel on the bottom of the right-hand page of this spread (136–7, see Figure 4) shows almost unidentifiable bird feet and wingtip at the top, while the panel is centered on the boldly-lettered, onomatopoetic “iiiirrkkk,” leading to Emmanuel’s wide, confused eyes (he is the largest figure, on the far-right corner of an almost blank panel, framed at medium close-up). This initial double page is one that is slow to read and digest. The splash panel on the top of the right-hand page (137) gives a lot of visual information, while the on-going discussion between the brothers is a lengthy back and forth (started over coffee on the previous double page). Emmanuel recreates the conversation in direct dialogue, but this sequence is multi-vocal in that it includes Francois’s emails to his partner Marile, where he speaks of his feelings about the decision, and his fears about how it will impact their professional collaboration and their “fraternité.” The next double-page spread is composed of an initially somewhat puzzling photograph 150 FIGURE 4. Emmanuel and François go for a walk to discuss whether to accept Patrice’s solution of allowing only François participate in the raid. Emmanuel and François Lepage, La Lune est blanche © Futuropolis (2014), p. 136–7. INKS FIGURE 5. The brothers’ discussion about the raid is interrupted when birds attack. Emmanuel is pictured ducking away from one of the birds. Emmanuel and François Lepage, La Lune est blanche © Futuropolis (2014), p. 138–9. of Emmanuel, seen from the rear—he is bent over, almost as if he is picking something up (Figure 5). As I mentioned above, the initial panel on the bottom of page 137 gives only a hint of the bird’s feet and wingtips to explain the loud sound. The double-page photograph shows the two birds, but because even the closest of the two birds is somewhat distant, and oriented away from the man, it is not entirely clear why Emmanuel is bent over. In the subsequent page, Emmanuel re-draws the encounter, and François narrates it via email: “Marile, I was flabbergasted, I was laughing. The situation seemed totally off-kilter. We were sliding around in something that we hadn’t wanted or imagined, we were in Hitchcock’s The Birds” (140, see Figure 6). So, what has happened here is that the photograph provides some advancement of narrative—more complete information than the initial panel (we see the whole bird as well as another in the distance), but re-narration of the incident in both text and image on the pages after the photograph is needed to show that multiple birds have flown at Emmanuel’s head. What the photograph gives most strongly is documentary evidence—precisely because it is in itself lacking in complete narrative, not just because it captures only an instant in time, but because the instant in 152 FIGURE 6. Figure 6. The bird attack as drawn by Emmanuel, on the page following the double-page photograph of the attack. Emmanuel and François Lepage, La Lune est blanche © Futuropolis (2014), p. 140. INKS question is not quite the right one (in terms of the relative positions of man and birds) for us to understand the story from it. In other words, the photograph’s narrative is nearly illegible. The photograph’s “wrongness” in narrative terms serves to prove its immediacy and authenticity—its “actuality.” Finally, the photograph has an aesthetic value. While the curious foreground composition bears strong narrative and documentary charge, the rocks and clouds remain evocative of Francois’s less instantaneously composed landscape photographs. These appear both with and without the human figure(s), machinery, or construction(s) that provide scale and compositional interest (as well as documentary and narrative value). (An example can be seen on 208–9). This multi-valued use of the photographic double-page spread is precisely analogous to the drawn or painted double-page spreads that Emmanuel uses in Lune and elsewhere in the environmental triptych (as discussed in the previous section)—including the fact that these spreads have no page numbers (which lends them equivalent aesthetic weight). In Lune, the two hand-drawn double-page spreads are in fact both of points of view that would be impossible for the brothers to have photographically documented. The first, because it is a historical scene and the second (76–7), because it is from an omniscient point-of-view—looking at the Astrolabe navigating the ice pack from a point some way distant, floating above the water on rather un-calm seas. This omniscient point of view is similar to Emmanuel’s images of himself in Chernobyl (as in the top panel in Figure 3)—the documentarian steps outside of his own point of view in order to better document. So, in terms of what kind of value and function the photographs (particularly in double-page spreads) have in Lune, there is a very close equivalence between François and Emmanuel’s respective art. However, the publishing (and marketing) choices made by the Lepages and Futuropolis seem to emphasize the documentary “value added.” First, the 26-page dossier on the Concordia Research Station is essentially made of photographs and informative text. Emmanuel’s hand-originated contribution to this section comes almost exclusively in the form of the sketched portraits seen elsewhere in the triptych as a documentary counterpoint to panels that advance narrative. Second, as well as being for sale as individual volumes, Futuropolis created a box set titled Antarctique that included Perspectiveart9’s Ombres claires.38 This marketing strategy connects the two books for their potential readership in a much tighter fashion than other pairings of comic and photographic albums. COUNTERPOINTS AND CONCLUSIONS The foregrounding of François’s photographs as distinctive aesthetic and documentary objects in the final section of La Lune est blanche, and the commercial positioning of Lune and Ombres claires together must necessarily skew how we understand the photographs within the comic. I have argued that the photographs’ documentary and aesthetic value is thus positioned as more important than their narrative integration and moreover, that the aesthetic resonances between François’ and Emmanuel’s panels are used throughout the text as a means of emphasizing the documentary value of the comic itself. In conclusion, 154 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE I would like to turn briefly to a different pairing of BD and photography book that shows that the marketing advantages that in this case emphasize the authority and documentary value of the BD do not run exclusively in one direction. Appearing in the same year as the Lepage brothers’ text is Jean-Yves Bardin’s book of photographic portraits of Angevin vintners, Vignerons d’Anjou: Gueules de Vignerons [The Mugs of Angevin Vintners]. Accompanied by texts by Patrick Rigourd, this book focuses particularly on producers of “le vin naturel,” a self-identified “natural” category of wine that includes a variety of philosophical parameters and praxes, but globally can be understood as a collection of viticultural practices that include making the wine “on the vine” as opposed to in the cellar (in other words, relative non-intervention once wine has been casked), the use of organic forms of fertilization and pest or weed control, and biodynamic growing techniques. This is a growing but minority production culture, typically overlapping with the hard-core end of terroir enthusiasts,39 and Bardin and Rigourd’s engagement in this book is not only simply one of portraiture, but also to help promote awareness of these environmentally engaged agricultural practices. As a means of underlining and giving authority to this pedagogical documentary purpose, the book includes a preface by cartoonist Étienne Davodeau. Such a contribution might at first seem unlikely, but in 2011, Davodeau had published the immensely successful The Initiates.40 This documentary comic tells the “criss-crossed” narrative of the mutual education of Davodeau and Richard Leroy, a vintner (whose portrait appears in Vignerons D’Anjou). In this BD, Davodeau chronicles the two artisan’s exchanges, teaching each other the other’s business—in the case of Davodeau this entails predawn trips to the fields and other challenging physical labor. For his part, Leroy is given reading assignments and taken on field-trips to visit publishers and printers. The critical and public success of The Initiates thus situates Davodeau as a personage with sufficient authority to contribute a preface that might attract the attention of a broader public. Such a practice of inviting public figures with some connection to a given subject matter to contribute prefaces is of course a long-standing practice in the book publishing industry. What is interesting is that in this case, a comics artists’ learning experience via his production of a documentary comic is specifically what lends him the authority to fill such a role. Unlike the comics and photography book pairings mentioned above, this is purely an intertextual relationship—Davodeau does not use photography within The Initiates, nor does Vignerons include any illustrations drawn by Davodeau. However, I find the comparison instructive insofar as it provides a concrete example wherein the documentary bande dessinée, through the authority of its author, is used to underscore the documentary value of photography, rather than the reverse. La Lune est blanche, in counterpoint to The Photographer, and The Initiates shows the variety of possible relationships between the two media. In Lune, while there is clear-cut narrative integration, the documentary and aesthetic value of the photographs is mobilized and serves to underline those qualities of the comic into which they are embedded. 155 INKS NOTES 1. Emmanuel and François Lepage, La Lune est blanche (Paris: Futuropolis, 2014). Parenthetical citations used for page numbers of this text. For this and other titles, I offer an English translation in brackets when no published translation is yet available, and thereafter continue to refer to the work by its French title. An unbracketed English title that follows the French by a “/” indicates a published translation is available—in this case, I refer to the work by its English-language title thereafter. 2. François Lepage, Les Ombres claires (Perspectivesart9, 2014). 3. As is already evident, the three key lenses through which I am measuring the role of photography within comics, using the main example of La Lune est blanche, are aesthetic, documentary, and narrative. By aesthetic, I refer to the formal, artistic qualities of the image. Photographs have a dramatically different aesthetic from the hand-drawn panel. But this is not the only aesthetic shift present in comics—the reproduction (through drawing of a different style from that typical of the one deployed by the comics artist throughout the text) of various types of documents would be one example, sketch work would be another. Narrative refers to the story being told. In the case of documentary comics, the narrative is non-fictional, although not necessarily a non-dramatic. Documentary refers to the quality of the comic that connects it in some privileged fashion to real world actors and events. I consider these to be values that are both textual and intentional/ functional—that is to say that they can be identified by textual analysis, but they are also functions of authorial/artistic intention and readerly expectations as mediated by the text’s presentation and circulation as an object. 4. For a discussion of Voyage à Tchernobyl as travel writing, see Évelyne Deprêtre, “Le récit de voyage: du genre littéraire au genre en bande dessinée. L’exploration d’Un printemps à Tchernobyl d’Emmanuel Lepage,” in Odyssesys/Odyssées: Travel Narratives in French/Récit de voyages en français, ed. Jeanne Garane (Leiden/ Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017), 210–28. 5. Étienne Davodeau, Les Ignorants: Récit d’une initiation croisée (Paris: Futuropolis, 2011)/The Initiates: A Comics Artist and a Wine Artisan Exchange Jobs (New York: NBM Publishing, 2013); Patrick Rigourd (texts), Jean-Yves Bardin (images), Étienne Davodeau (preface), Vignerons d’Anjou: Gueules de Vignerons (Avon-les-Roches: Anovi, 2014). 6. Emmanuel Lepage (b. 1966) has been actively working in the French comics industry since the late 1980s. Prior to creating the works discussed in this article, he had been the artist for numerous fictional BD series of various genres, working with many different scriptwriters, as well as occasionally being responsible for both writing and drawing. 7. I prefer “triptych” to “trilogy,” because it has less implication of continued, or serial, narrative. However, the Désolation and Lune have both been distributed as a box set under the collected title Antarctique. Subsequently Lepage has published Les Voyages d’Ulysse [The Travels of Ulysses], with Sophie Michel and René Follet (Paris: Daniel Maghen, 2016), and Ar-men: l’enfer des enfers [Ar-men: The Hell of Hells] (Paris: Futuropolis, 2017), both of which are also maritime narratives. Ar-men has a documentary aspect, but is primarily fictional. 8. Emmanuel Lepage, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation (Paris: Futuropolis, 2011); Caroline Britz & François Lepage, Marion Dufresne: ravitailleur du bout du monde [Marion Dufresne: Supply-ship to the ends of the earth] (Rennes: Marines Éditions, 2012). 9. Emmanuel Lepage, Un printemps à Tchernobyl (Paris: Futuropolis, 2012); Gildas Chasseboeuf and Emmanuel Lepage Les Fleurs de Tchernobyl: Carnet de voyage en terre irradiée [The Flowers of Chernobyl: Travel sketchbook of an irradiated land] (Anthony: La boîte à bulles, 2012 [Les Dessin’acteurs, 2008]). To be precise about the timeline, it should be noted that Lepage’s sojourn in Chernobyl actually took place prior to the Kerguelen islands trip, although the BD appeared after Voyage aux îles. 10. Family is a part of all three books as well: François actually appears in the early pages of Tchernobyl, while Emmanuel is debating whether to make the trip or not—François decides not to go. 11. Bdthèque.com is comparable to the Grand Comics Database as a reference site, but includes significant evaluative sections (reader/user reviewers and forums), so has a user base analogous to that of rottentomatoes.com or imdb.com. Lepage’s artist/author page, which contains all of the genre designations for his books 156 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE is visible here: http://bdtheque.com/search.php?cboScenariste=Lepage%20(Emmanuel)&cboDessinateur= Lepage%20(Emmanuel)&chkDetails=on&scroll=0. 12. As I have argued elsewhere, documentary is documentary because of a dynamic relationship between creator intention and activity, textual aesthetic and form, and the presentation to/interaction with a body of reader/viewers. See Margaret C. Flinn, “Documentary and Realism,” in Directory of World Cinema: France, ed. Tim Palmer and Charles Michael (Bristol, U. K.: Intellect, 2013), 504. While the a priori of documentary studies is that in some way documentary can be distinguished from fiction, that is not, however, to imply that this is a strict or non-porous boundary (see, for just one instance, Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995]). One can certainly set out to detail how documentary works mobilize many of the same narrative techniques of fictional ones. That would, however, be an extremely different focus. 13. Hillary L Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 5. 14. Chute, Disaster Drawn, 2. Some (myself included) are likely to disagree with the absolute characterization of “essential form” as “collection of frames.” Later in her introduction Chute repeats this assertion, and elaborates somewhat: “I also address the unique and related grammar of comics, which addresses itself to the concerns of documentary in its most fundamental syntactical operation, of framing moments of time and mapping bodies in space. In its multiplicity of juxtaposed frames on the page, comics operates differently from other documentary images in print, such as the single, information-dense or evocative photograph, or even photo essay, conventionally delivered by photojournalism” (16). 15. Chute, Disaster Drawn, 5. 16. Chute, Disaster Drawn, 19. 17. Jeff Adams’ Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) has a similar focus on drawing that occludes the question of transmediality in documentary comics. 18. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 158. 19. Rancière, Film Fables, 159. 20. Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier, Le Photographe: édition intégrale (Paris: Aire Libre/Dupuis, 2010) / The Photographer: Into War-torn Afganistan with Doctors Without Borders (New York: First Second, 2009). Individual volumes originally published in French in 2003, 2004, and 2006. 21. Nancy Pedri, “When Photographs Aren’t Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe,” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 6, no. 1 (2011), http://www.english.ufl.edu/ imagetext/archives/v6_1/pedri/; Daniel Lawson, “The Rhetorical Work of Remediation in The Photographer,” Studies in Comics 5, no. 2 (2014): 319–36. 22. Jens Schrötter, “Four Models of Intermediality,” in Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 15–36. 23. In turn, I would suggest that The Photographer might need revisitation with this different model in mind, since its images are not lacking in aesthetic or documentary function, and indeed a companion volume of photographs was published under the title Voyages en Afghanistan: le pays des citrons doux et des oranges amères [Travels in Afghanistan, Country of Sweet Lemons and Bitter Oranges] (Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre, Rennes: Ouest-France, 2003)—with an introduction by Guibert in comics form. Like the Lepage volumes, these two books clearly function in tandem, but to my knowledge the publishers Ouest-France and Dupuis did not jointly market the books, whereas Futuropolis and Perspectiveart9 went so far as to release their two books in a box set. The Photographer and Voyages en Afganistan are also distinct from the Rigourd/ Bardin and Davodeau pairing in that while the bédéiste contributes an introduction in both cases, Guibert as one of three co-authors of the BD has a differently invested relationship to the photography book produced by his Photographer co-authors, while Davodeau’s much thinner connection through Richard Leroy makes his introduction function more as an external celebrity endorsement. 24. Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse 15, no. 2 (Winter 1992–93): 3–29. This citation appears on p. 10 of the original article and is also cited by Chute, Disas- 157 INKS ter Drawn, 18. See also, Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 25. Chute, Disaster Drawn, 273. 26. The numbers in this depends upon exactly how big one feels a panel has to be to be a splash, but the vast majorities of these images do bleed across two pages. 27. These refer to instances of gutter-less or at least unframed, large, sketch book style, sometimes collage-like, drawings where Lepage does not at all respect the regular grid work that otherwise characterizes his comics. (Lepage tends to be a fairly “regular” bédéiste: he generally works within what is in French called the “gaufrier”—while his panels vary in size, they tend to be gridded with clear black frames on each panel and distinct, even gutters.) The numbers in this column do not include small portraits that do not at all violate the grid. These travelogue sketchbook style areas tend to flagrantly mix media (pencil or ink drawings, water colors/gouache, oil or chalk pastels), and the splash panels and double-page spreads similarly employ a variety (although the individual artwork is typically aesthetically unified) of media. In addition to the types of drawing or painting materials mentioned above, the books include postmarks, signatures of individuals whose portraits have been made, maps, and other types of “remediated” documents. 28. Both Désolation and Tchernobyl include a single photograph, of Emmanuel “in action,” sketching in situ, as part of their back matter. 29. One of the photographs is credited to The Institut Polaire Français Paul–Émile Victor [IPEV] (a group picture taken at the orientation for Astrolabe/expedition crew), Emmanuel took two, and François took the rest. 30. This quickness or “unfinishedness” is something that Lepage plays on extensively in Tchernobyl. This album contains a wider than normal range of types of drawing styles in framed panels, including some relatively rough oil pastels. These images emphasize the sense of immediacy underlined in the narrative by discussions of limiting possible radiation exposure, reminding the reader that these images are the product of the artist’s presence on the actual scene, and thereby underscoring the image’s documentary character. 31. The relationship between humans and landscapes devoid or nearly devoid of human life is a strong theme across the trilogy. It goes beyond the scope of this essay, but a more extensive study of the relationship between human and environment in Lepage’s work is warranted. 32. In Les Ombres claires, François remarks frequently on how working on this project is different from journalistic assignments (n.p.). 33. Lepage, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation, 58. 34. Lepage, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation, 56. 35. Lepage, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation, 56. 36. Lepage, Un printemps à Tchernobyl, 92–3. 37. Lepage, Un printemps à Tchernobyl, 109. 38. Incidentally, the box does not indicate to the reader that the photography book included within was actually put out by a different publisher. 39. “Terroir” evokes the combination of unique environmental factors (soil types, farming practices, microclimate, etc.) that give an agricultural project its character. Terroir is a particularly potent notion in winemaking, but can come in to significant play in discussions of artisanal cheese production, as well as many other artisanal foodstuffs such as chocolate or honey. 40. Davodeau’s previous documentary comics have scarcely begun to percolate into English scholarly discourse (see Clare Tufts “Family History and Social History: Étienne Davodeau’s Reportage of Reality in Les Mauvaise gens,” European Comic Art 1, no.1 [2008]: 37–55, and a couple of passing mentions in Ann Miller’s Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French Language Comic Strip [Bristol: Intellect, 2007]), whereas his work appears more regularly in French language scholarship on bande dessinée and politics or geography (see, for example, Pascale Argod, “Du reportage graphique et du carnet de reportage: images géopolitiques, regards de reporters et témoignages du réel,” Belgeo: Revue belge de géographie 2 [2014] http:// 158 MARGARET C. FLINN • PHOTOGRAPHY IN DOCUMENTARY BANDE DESSINÉE journals.openedition.org/belgeo/12843; Elisa Bricco, “Le roman graphique et l’Histoire: pour un récit engagé,” Cahiers de Narratologie 24 [2014] DOI: 10.4000/narratologie.6864 [revues.org]; Vincent Veschambre “Quand la bande dessinée parle de paysage et de géopolitique locale: Rural! D’Étienne Davodeau, Isabelle Trivisan-Moreau, ed. Paysage politique, le regard de l’artiste [Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011] <halshs-01128916>). 159