Poetics of photography: possible levels of interpretation (based on modern English-language photo-ekphrastic prose)

The aim of this research is to determine the possible levels of interpreting a photograph presented in the form of photo-ekphrasis in a literary text. In this article, photography is considered from a semiotic perspective and defined as a "text" possessing different levels of interpretation that are directly dependent on the cultural thesaurus of the reader-viewer. The scientific novelty lies in the possibility of interpreting a photograph on such levels as plot, characterological, spatial-temporal, narrative, and motif-thematic. The analysis of each of these levels demonstrates a wide range of possibilities for writers considering the problem of the visual, which conditions such relevant philosophical and aesthetic questions as the relationship between fact and fiction, photography and history, photography and context, and others. The results of the research justified the proposed logic and, based on this, revealed the genre-forming potential of photo-ekphrasis – a constitutive feature of modern English-language photo-ekphrastic prose as a unique phenomenon in the global literary process.