Writing a Life Written in Pictures: Postmemorial Phototextualities in Helena Janeczek’s La ragazza con la Leica

This chapter examines Helena Janeczek’s The Girl with the Leica (2017), a phototextual experiment in life writing about the pioneering photojournalist Gerda Taro. Applying a structural approach and drawing on signature concepts from Holocaust, Memory and Trauma Studies and Gender Studies, it explores the phototextual effects and rhetorics Janeczek employs to articulate an ethical, postmemorial, heteroautobiographical narrative. To this end, the chapter addresses the following questions: what is the function of pictures in a biographical novel about a photographer?; what mechanism does the text orchestrate between images and words?; whose life is told through images and written memories? and, finally, what is the overall purpose of this singular literary work?