Cross-media references between literature and photography have always been accompanied by a problematic assumption of transparence, which demands from the text a similar transparency in terms of the reality it depicts to that which is offered by a photograph. Should the photographic act come into view as a referential process, a reality effect can develop whereby the demand for similitude can become secondary. In detailed text analyses on works by Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Georges Perec and Denis Roche, Johanne Mohs shows that when that happens, even the materiality of language comes to serve the illusion of reality.
