photoromance

Photoromance (or photo-novel), popular photographic picture story, published in individual or serial form, borrowing both comic-strip and cinematic conventions. Its precursor was the cine-novel, pioneered by William Selig in the Chicago Tribune in 1913. The fotoromanzo flourished in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s (Grand Hotel, 1946-; Bolero Film, 1947-), and was satirized in Federico Fellini's first film, Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheikh, 1952). Fotoromanzi were either cut-down versions of feature films or were shot specially, emphasizing the modishly dressed protagonists while settings were minimally rendered. Though essentially a pulp product, the fotoromanzo was briefly adopted by mainstream publishers like Mondadori, which in 1953 issued a photo version of Alessandro Manzoni's 19th-century classic I promessi sposi. But leading players in both Italy and France were the Del Duca brothers, whose productions, despite competition from television, continue to appear and are widely translated. In Britain, titles like Oh Boy and Photo-Love Monthly (both 1976-), and My Guy, Jackie, and Blue Jeans, are aimed at teenage girls; tabloid newspapers use the format to illustrate agony-aunt columns.

Digital photography and the Internet gave the genre a new lease of life. Teenage enthusiasts produced web-comic versions (sometimes ironically modified) of sci-fi classics like Star Wars. Schools used it as a tool for language teaching. In Quebec, photography was used to create interactive narratives that could be disseminated in print, on the Internet, and on CD-ROM. One such was the ‘photoroman aléatoire’ (random photoromance) Liquidation created by Michel Lefebvre and Eva Quintas 1994-8.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• Fotoromanzo: fascino e pregiudizio (1979).
• Scott, C., The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (1999)