The article considers an example of a (photo) graphic novel based on the work of French authors D. Lefèvre, E. Guibert and F. Lemercier “The Photographer”
(Le Photographe, 2006) in which text, drawing and photography are equivalent structuralartistic components. “The Photographer” tells the story of one of the book’s authors, Didier Lefèvre, who worked as a war correspondent in 1986 in Afghanistan. The genre uniqueness of the analysed work is conditioned by the representation of such novel subgenres as the autofictional novel, historical novel, biographical novel, documentary novel, novel about a war photographer, etc., which interact within the same textual field. The authors of the article pay special attention to the explicit structural component of “Le Photographe”, which is a photo that provides the possibility of multiple interpretations of the images and the narrative-motivational complex of the work. The study reveals that along with the graphic image and text, the photo becomes one of the fundamental structural elements that allows authors to recreate “subjective objectivity” in comprehending the military events in Afghanistan. Through the crossing of several genre forms and the strategy of documentary provided by photographic images, the writers deliver an indictment of war as an element which is hostile to people and destructive to human lives.
For citation: Poluektova T.A., Prudius I.G. D. Lefèvre, E. Guibert, F. Lemercier’s “Le Photographe” as a (photo) graphic novel: representative specificity of the genre, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2025, iss. 2, pp. 48—56.