Photo novel

Image from the photographic novel Graduated Drama

A photo novel (also photo comic ) is a sequence of individual photos, similar to the still photos in a film, which together form a story. Dialogues are often inserted into the photos . Usually they are melodramatic love stories. There are short interim remarks that occasionally connect the images, but longer text passages do not appear.

Photo novels are hardly available in stores in Germany, and they are gradually dying out in other countries as well. They first emerged in the mid-1940s in Italy, where they developed into a long-standing mass phenomenon with a variety of forms. So there was B. literary photographic novels based on classics from world literature such as "The Bride and Groom" by Alessandro Manzoni or "The Wretched" by Victor Hugo. Actresses such as Sophia Loren , Gina Lollobrigida , Silvana Mangano and many others worked for photo novels at the beginning of their careers.

In the 1970s in particular, Italian photo novels - almost all of them by “Lancio” in Rome - experienced a high boom in Romance countries: almost nine million copies a month under different titles. Translations - so to speak, "synchronizations" - into Spanish, French and also into German brought the same stories with a time delay. In Germany, Ehapa published the magazine series Angela , Daniela , Michaela and Pamela in the 1980s and 1990s .

In magazines like “ Bravo ” you can still find photo novels, usually heart-ache stories from the teenage scene. The satirical magazine Titanic also publishes such photo novels, usually with photos of political celebrities.

In the age of the Internet , however, the photo novel is coming back to life, often in the form of student work for a website. Occasionally, all kinds of photos are combined into a photo novel on private websites. There are very few professionally made photographic novels and comics on the Internet. Most photo comics are productions whose stories are told using toy figures. The German superhero photo comic "Union of Heroes" is one of the few exceptions in which living actors are used.

• Photo novel on postcards (1913)
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literature

• Jan Baetens: The film photonovel: a cultural history of forgotten adaptations , Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-4773-1822-5

Web links

• Example of a professionally made photo comic: “Union of Heroes”, a story about superheroes in the Ruhr area
• Example of a toy figure photo comic: "Memento Mori"
• Example of an artistic underground photo comic: "The long way down", here too photographs are the basis
• Comic Life to create a photo comic