The Art of Vacillation : Photographs in Alain de Botton's Iconotexts

International audienceFrom his first novel, Essays in Love (1993), to his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness (2006), British writer Alain de Botton has increasingly demonstrated his constant and profound esteem of images. All of his work – fictional and non-fictional – might be perceived as iconotexts involving a dialogue between two semiotic codes as they are marked by the insertion of photographs, paintings, drawings, charts, tables, diagrams and graphs. The aim of this paper is to focus more particularly on photographic images and to investigate the relationship between photographs incorporated in the books, and the text and context in which they appear. I propose to examine challenging interactions of text and photographs when they more particularly problematize issues of representation, epistemology, reliability, authenticity and artifice. I first analyse some of the unexpected photographs incorporated in The Art of Travel, in order to show to what extent they confirm the author's original perspective on the activity of travelling and provoke a new evaluation of both the tone and the status of the text. I then focus on the photographs included in Kiss & Tell and demonstrate how they further develop the playful deconstruction of the codes of the traditional biography already implemented in the text, engaging both an ontological and an epistemological debate