[Seven Stories Press; 2024]
Tr. from the French by Alison Strayer
Composed of photographs, followed by alternating reflections from writer Annie Ernaux and journalist Marc Marie on the period of time when Ernaux and Marie were in a relationship as Ernaux underwent treatment for breast cancer, The Use of Photography is a sharp and unflinching documentation of the everyday, examining what it means to witness, to mark, to photograph. In these vignettes that reflect on the photo, Ernaux and Marie, in their splicing together of two selves through the photographs, think through how one exists in relation to the other, marked by the passage of time, over the course of a year. In this starkly drawn portrait of their relationship framed by the immediacy of Ernaux’s treatments for her cancer, a central marker of the relationship between body and time, this hybrid text examines intimacy in relation to literature. “Photos lie, always,” writes Marie, towards the end of the book, a reminder of the fallibility of documentation, the way archive always gestures to absence.
In her opening, a preface to the performance of photography and reflection, the only piece in the book that remains unencumbered by what the photograph documents, Ernaux writes: “It was a different landscape every time. Having to destroy it by separating and picking up each of our belongings made my heart heavy. I felt as if I were removing the only objective trace of our pleasure.” Shortly after, she writes: “For the first time, I thought that this arrangement born of desire and accident, doomed to disappear, should be photographed.” Here Ernaux highlights the tension that remains at the center of this project and the questions it seeks to ask; the photograph begins, for Ernaux, as a marker of intimacy, a way to record something ephemeral, coming out of the sense of presence always leading to absence in the real lived world of this relationship.
Ernaux writes too, in the opening, of the desires that shaped this project and the form it grew to take: “It was as if what we’d thought until then would be enough to preserve a trace of our moments of love—the photos—was not enough and we needed something more—writing.” Out of this impulse—the idea that photo and text might come together—Ernaux and Marie venture into a new form of documentation, of record keeping, of making real the ephemeral. Nothing is quite enough here to grasp at the fleeting, even as photos do mark a presence. In the first photo in the book, clothes are strewn across a hallway, white tiles and pink walls make up the background of the photo, even as the photo itself documents the background of Ernaux and Marie themselves, both marked in space, in this home, by the presence of their clothes, a pair of shoes, jeans, a jacket, all haphazardly across the center of the photo. To the left, we open with Ernaux writing; she articulates, over the course of twelve or so lines, an incredibly detailed description of the photograph, what is central, what is foregrounded, what disappears. In drawing our attention so specifically to this cataloguing of the everyday—how these still life photographs obscure the viewers, the spectators looking onto this moment marked in the photo, Ernaux and Marie themselves, clearly present in the larger scene of this moment, but not visible—writing and photography together, then, for Ernaux and Marie here become a way instead to gesture at absence, to make clearer the shape of what is missing in order to more fully read the photograph. In theorizing the photograph, the photograph transcends its material role into becoming a means to writing, becoming speculative, in a sense. In this triangulation of photograph, speculation, and intimacy, Ernaux and Marie read each other anew, looking both to the future and past, time collapsing into the photo and its singular moment of witness.
Each section of the book opens with a photograph, moving then in Ernaux’s meditations followed by Marie’s. In this routine, repetitive formal structure, language exists expansively, doing what the photograph cannot, just as the photograph documents both absence and presence, reality and unreality, which language here necessarily cannot, not in the subjective perspectives of Ernaux and Marie. “I was looking for a literary form that would contain my whole life. It did not yet exist,” says Ernaux, early on, of language itself. The photograph becomes for Ernaux, then, a way to reconcile the simultaneous reality and unreality of a material and interior life—subjectivity against and with the real world, against and with the documentation of fact, of a shared material existence. She says too of the form this book takes: “Conversely, the writing under the photos, in multiple fragments which will themselves be broken up by those of M., as yet unknown, give me (among other things) the chance to create a minimal narrative out of this reality.” Ernaux highlights the productive tensions of this book that make it such an affecting read—the sense of curiosity that shapes the formal structures of the book, an experiment in literary form that asks how language might situate itself with the photo in order to reflect more sharply the distortions of the world and of one’s subjectivity.
Alongside Ernaux’s framing of the project, in a later section, Marie writes: “The spontaneous act of taking photos became a matter of ritual.” Ritual becomes the repetitive act that bonds the photograph as a formal structure of the book to the real lived experiences and intimacies that this project comes out of, a converging artistic practice, a converging life. In one section, Ernaux says of the hotel room as a space of their relationship: “A hotel room, with its double impermanence, temporal and spatial, is for me a place where the pain of love is felt most acutely.” Ritual becomes a way to write against the ephemerality of the interpersonal relationships we share with anyone and everyone, relationships that exist in the abstract spaces of encounter, something accessible only in memory. Marie writes in a later section: “Waking up beside each other with no clothes or makeup on, breath sour and eyes full of sleep, can be a point of no return: you either rush into the shower and set your sights on going home as quickly as possible, or you stay for breakfast.” Here, Marie points us to how the everyday manifests in his relationship with Ernaux, the two choices offering the tension between the alternatives of a single encounter or of the everyday, of something as routine as sharing food. The mundanity of breakfast in this moment, its speculative possibility, becomes a way to read how Ernaux and Marie are writing against and into the ephemerality of routine. Photographs too exist similarly for Ernaux and Marie; rather than documenting each other, shifting selves, they document the one constant of their relationship: clothes in rooms. The light may be different in each photo, the two of them in different moments, selves each time, their lives in different moments, but the clothes strewn haphazardly across the room become that routine everyday of staying for breakfast, as Marie says. For Ernaux and Marie, the ritual of the photography, the routine documentation of the clothes strewn across rooms in their encounters with each other are a way to document the mundanity of the everyday, for it to become the starting point through which to think through the world, think through one’s relationship to time and its ephemerality.
Ernaux’s shifting relationship to her body as not just hers, but as a body in relation to the world, a site of medical treatment, becomes central to the project of documentation too. She writes early in the book: “For months my body was a theater of violent operations.” Here, the body becomes theater—something to be viewed, not lived, not experienced, a performance instead. She says later of the genre of the medical images: “For months my body was photographed innumerable times, from every angle and with every technique in existence.” In using photograph, Ernaux converges the medical experience of her body with the intimate experience of her body as a space of pleasure. This contrast is central to how this project becomes a way for Ernaux to reframe her selfhood in the wake of her diagnosis and new relationship to time, death, and mortality.
Of sharing her cancer diagnosis with others, she says: “I could see my future absence in their eyes.” The photograph becomes then a way for Ernaux to resist this perception, resist the future absence of herself, a way for her to write herself in a way that does not vanish into absence, but becomes an echo instead, something present, something longer, rather than a fleeting self in the world. It becomes instead a way for her to write a history of herself. Neither Ernaux nor Marie are in any of the photos; the photos themselves document space and objects, shots of hotel rooms and kitchens and other shared spaces. Ernaux’s absence in these photos then becomes a productive interplay between a desired absence and an imposed absence—the photo becomes a way not for her to document herself, but to instead gesture to what is not present in the photo; the clothes and shoes gesture to her presence in the vicinity, her and Marie haunting the photo. The light across these photographs shifts, some dim in the night, some framed by bright sunlight filtering in through the windows. The photographs are always, in a sense, cluttered—clothes and shoes and other objects that are always in a state of artful disarray, the everyday sense of chaos that is the dominating visual sense of the photo, a sharp contrast to the literary retrospective framing of these in the written asides.
Marie writes later of seeing Ernaux in a photo—one that is not included in the book—“I look back at the woman laughing next to me, this laughing woman, so alive, whose birth was contingent on the death of her sister, and whose life, for a time, hung by a thread. It’s a strange feeling. Like being weightless ghosts, accidental spectators.” Ernaux and Marie here, in the photos that shape the book, that provide the scaffolding, “weightless ghosts,” in a sense. It is impossible not to read them into the photos, and yet they are never concretely, tangibly, present in this novel; language creates for them new selves here, selves that are not the ones who took the photos, private acts of desire and witnessing, and in their absence from the photos themselves, they become haunting presences in the text, absent presences, the text always gesturing to them, language and photo filling in gaps around them, their absence still witnessed.
In Alison Strayer’s translation, Ernaux and Marie’s asides embody a lyricism central to documenting the quotidian. In these two accounts of this relationship, mediated always by the photographs they take, a shared documentative accounting, in some ways, of their relationship to each other, there is something magical at work across the starkness of the photos and the lyricism of the prose. Both Ernaux and Marie’s voices work in conjunction here to highlight the spaces outside the photographs, to fill in meaning around the series of photographs, a braided framework that allows us to read anew the documentative tensions of the photograph as a medium, a medium that, by the end of this project, becomes slippery, in a sense, as both accounts fill in the imaginative gaps rendered by the photograph itself.
Ernaux says in her introduction of the first time she took one of these photos: “When I came downstairs and saw the pieces of clothing and lingerie, the shoes, scattered over the tiles of the corridor in the sunlight, I had a sensation of sorrow and beauty.” This book, in many ways, recreates this exact tension for us—that of sorrow and beauty. Their relationship, an embodied one, is always in tension with the hospital settings we know Ernaux finds herself in, outside the spaces of these photos. The photographs suspend time, and the language, despite its lyricism, unsuspends time for us.
“Without having planned it, we are laying the foundations for a parenthetical temporality, a journey with no end in sight,” writes Marie of this project. This sense of the parenthetical temporality, a sense of speculative possibility contained in the finite limits of the sentence, or the paragraph, these smaller units of language, render sharply into focus the necessity of this project, of thinking through illness alongside joy, of thinking through absence alongside presence. In these meditative fragments, in these photos, Ernaux and Marie write a new and urgent rethinking of the limits and possibilities of the photograph, and what literature offers us in relation to the hauntings of speculative absence.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Public Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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