The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

French memoir

Original title – L’usage  de la photo

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source- personal copy

I heard Ernaux and Modiano the two most recent winners of the Nobel prize s, work described as a whole piece like a greater universe. Each book is almost a part of great work in the same universe like a Star Wars universe or Marvel universe. These writers’ books populate a world of there now each piece a little bit of a great worker in Enraux world is her life she mines. Still, here she is helped by the photographs of her affair (she is very french with all these affairs, isn’t she just ). The pictures are by the French photographer and writer Marc Marie, with whom she had an affair more than twenty years ago. There is a sense this is the time photos cross from an object maybe to something. We all have phones full of pictures at this time and dig cameras with great storage, so when she starts to take photos of the aftermath of their meeting, the crumpled clothes, it is like a moment caught in Amber.

Clothing and shoes are scattered all the way down an entrance hallway with big pale tiles. In the foreground, on the right, is a red jumper or shirt and black tank top that appear to have been torn off and turned inside out in the same movement, resembling a low-cut bust with the arms cut off. A white label is clearly visible on the tank top. Further on is a pair of curled-up jeans with a black belt attached. To the left of the jeans, the red lining of a red jacket is spread out like a cloth for cleaning the floor.

On top of that, a pair of blue-chequered boxer shorts and a white bra, one of whose straps is stretching out towards the jeans. Behind, a men’s boot lies on its side next to a rumpled blue sock. Standing far apart and perpendicular to each other are two black high-heeled pumps. Even further away, protruding from under the radiator, is the black splotch of a jumper or skirt.

There first meet with a photgraph

Annie was just recovering from chemo and had lost hair so this affair, with its burning passion, serves in the photos as she is recovering. The pictures capture the affair and recovery both in a way , capturing that passion in the crumbled discarded clothes between them on the floor as she recounts each encounter with Marc when he found out she was doing this she had said he had thought of taking pictures it is like an animal marking it territory or a bird building a nest these clothes the symbol of the previous night’s passion of sex between the pair. The lingering heap of clothes. Capture how an affair burned brightly and is remembered in her usual open style.

A black beast with a huge head and an atrophied body ending in a heart-shaped appendage seems to be tumbling down a yellow wall, along with an object bent into a V shape, a boot twisted into a V, and a large desert rose, made of stone. Underneath is another boot, folded over on itself, which has landed on a pale floor. There is no perspective in this tableau, in which the yellow wall and white floor are extensions of each other. Everything appears flat, weightless, immaterial, caught in a long slow descent, like Don Juan as played by Michel Piccoli in the Marcel Bluwal film, whirling towards hell to the music of Mozart’s Requiem.

The last meeting has a darkness and sorrow in the opening her

Discussing her books is hard as we know what we are getting from her life. It is a chronicle of her life. Her open look at her life captures her so well. Photos, I remember an interview with Wim Wenders, a prolific photographer. He said,”I see a young man who impulsively took photos. I still recognise the impulses, and seeing that some have remained the same is a pleasure. Some, of course, got into my body, so I sometimes wonder who took those pictures. Was it my body – my thumbs and hands, my eyes – or was it a conscious act”

I thought of this when I read this book. He is a man who has taken thousands of pictures and is like Ernaux, someone whose whole life seems to be a project. His films all have a theme of the journey of life. I ve drift and now going drift again into another favourite artist of mine is, Robert Smith. Of course, with the new Cure album due, I’ve been thinking back on his lyrics as I read this book and, of course, the opening of his song Picture of You. “I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel”

Maybe that is the feeling of the affair in the pictures—that ripping of clothes, that brief fling captured in the crumbled discarded clothes of the evening before the flotsam and jetsam of passion on the morning shore, so to speak. I hope you don’t mind. I’m trying to be a little more fluid in my reviews and digressive, so belt up, and let’s see where in my mind the reads I am reading take me!

Have you a view on Ernaux?