Facepoeia: The Author Becoming a Photographic Subject. The Example of Tadeusz Różewicz

Abstract

This paper reflects on the visual practices involving the circulation of portraits of authors in their publications, and in public sphere. The photographic portrait of the author interjects the belief that the presence of the author through and in the image familiarizes and intensifies its subject’s presence and declares the author’s identity. As a visual paratext, a portrait becomes an autobiographical space of self-invention and self-construction. I wish to illustrate these processes by focusing on Tadeusz Różewicz’s 1921–2014 complex ways of accessing visibility and manners of “fixing” his identity in the collaborative work he produced with the photographer Adam Hawałej under the title Rubbish Dump 2015.