ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a selection of the images informing the book is gathered as a central interleaf—a Picture Archive—to be “criss-crossed”, to use Nicole Brossard’s term, with each other and the text across the book. Following Brossard and W.J.T. Mitchell on picture theory, the Picture Archive contributes to the book’s creative-critical conversation by cross-composing visual images from the archive with poetic and critical words. It is also projecting from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, a new style of essay composed around five photographs, and itself a form of feminist proto-picture theory. Other sources include Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine text, Rootprints (1997), which combines family photographs with memoire text, and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) where untitled images are placed into the narrative as loose reference points, yet around which the text is seemingly structured.
