Ekphrasis

Here are a couple examples of the description of photographs in novels, a technique that seems to turn up a lot in historical fiction. The first is from the opening of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Little Casino (2002), which takes place in Depression-era Brooklyn:

People enter and then inhabit, helplessly, periods of their lives during which they look as if death has spoken to them, or, even more eerily, as if they themselves are companions to death. It is not usual for others to notice this in daily intercourse, but the look is manifest in photographs taken during these periods.

He and his wife stand side by side in casual summer clothes, comfortable, and, as they say, contemporary, but in no other way remarkable ... In the man's face we can see, clearly, the imprint of death left there years ago by the deaths of his mother and father, who died less than a year apart.

The second is from Alice McDermott’s After This (2006), in a section about a secretary in New York during the 1940s:

When she appears in photographs of that day, her dark suit is slashed by a white sling, and under her stylish turban, her big powdered face is dignified, carved in ivory, only a certain determination about the jaw and the mouth betraying a reluctant smile.

I’m posting these mostly because I think they are memorable passages, rather than opportunities for brilliant commentary. I’ll just say that both use photographs as a means of analyzing somebody’s pain.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1995), which is about "the future" even though its vision has not held up terribly well, contains an immortal footnote on the filmography of James O. Incandenza. His adolescent son tries to determine from the objective and clinical description of Incandenza's absurdist films the reason for his suicide:

Death in Scarsdale. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Marlon R. Bain; 78 mm; 39 minutes; color; silent w/ closed-caption subtitles. Mann/Allen parody, a world-famous dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) becomes platonically obsessed with a boy (Bain) he is treating for excessive perspiration, and begins himself to suffer from excessive perspiration. UNRELEASED