'A Proof That I Did Exist': Janet Frame and Photography (Critical Essay‪)‬

First published separately, the three volumes of Janet Frame's autobiography--To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985)--were gathered in 1989 under the title An Autobiography. Unlike the previous editions, this one contains thirty-two pages of photographs--sixteen in To the Is-Land and eight in each of the following volumes. In his biography of Frame, Michael King reports that this addition originated from a conversation the film-makers Jane Campion and Bridget Ikin had with Janet Frame while they were working on the adaptation of the trilogy: Bridget Ikin explains that her question was motivated by the text itself: 'I'd been wondering about the nature of Janet's memory in the autobiographies. It seemed so photographic; the childhood episodes in particular were so specific. I asked if she had any photographs.' (2) The inclusion of these photographs in the book is more significant than it might seem: as they interrupt the reading, the pictures and their captions necessarily interact with the text. According to Tessa Barringer, the nature of Frame's autobiographical project has something to do with photography in the sense that it aims at 'fixing' her story: