An anthology gathering eleven stories by different writers, each born of an image that inspired whoever wrote it, either as a suggestion or as a pretext. What is particular about these texts, and about these images, is that the images are photographs. The pieces are presented in order of date, beginning with a striking exercise in style by Lewis Carroll of 1855 and ending with an equally remarkable exercise by Antonio Tabucchi of 2011, in which one of the most celebrated images in the history of the medium — the self-portrait as a drowned man made by Hippolyte Bayard in 1840 — inspires a letter that Bayard himself might have written in that turbulent year when, around the birth of the new language and its patent, the fate of famous figures and the spread of the medium were decided. In this way, from the first text to the last, a kind of circle closes, both in time and in theme, since each story takes up one of the possible suggestions the medium can offer. From its birth it has fascinated writers: while some tried their hand directly with a camera, most absorbed the mysterious and ambiguous pull of the image.