Naked Truth

THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY. By Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2024 (2005). Pp. 114. Paperback, $20.66. Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and her lover Marc Marie developed a practice during her treatment for breast cancer, wherein they would take photographs of “the devastated landscape that remains after lovemaking”—the mix of clothes discarded, in haphazard fashion, across the floor—and, weeks later, sit together “side by side” on the sofa “with a drink in front of us and a CD playing in the background,” open the envelope of developed images and study the pictures together (19, 5). As an extension of this practice, they began to write—each of them separately—about some of these pictures. The result is this co-authored book composed of brief essays by each author and a selection of the post-coital images that served as the writing prompts. The book describes these scenes, each an “always new and unpredictable composition, whose elements—sweater, stockings, shoes—had organized themselves according to unknown laws, movements and gestures that we had forgotten, of which we had been unaware” (4). More interestingly, the book reflects on photography as practice and artifact (4). Such thinking has long been an obsession with Ernaux, a leitmotif of her oeuvre. But here, a philosophy of photography becomes more urgent in proximity to sex and sexual desire as well as to death, a looming shadow marked on Ernaux's body by such signs as overall hairlessness and a “catheter like a growth protruding from” her chest (13). Ernaux has many thoughts about photography, fragments of musings sometimes woven together, and sometimes left as loose strands. The following assertions offer something of a basic summation of repeated claims: Photography is always about time; photography has a tense relationship with memory, offering an inexact match; photography may elicit desire, but such desire is not the same as any desires felt in the actual act of taking the picture or in the scene photographed. As these observations suggest, photography may thus be seen as a token of absence. These photos of scattered garments represent an “invisible scene” and its “pain,” which is “[t]he pain of the photograph. It comes from wanting something other than what is. The boundless meaning of the photograph. A hole through which the fixed light of time, of nothingness is perceived” (96). In Ernaux's thinking, such absence may be extended as far as a memento mori generally (all photographs chronicle our mortality) or flag a more specific irritation at the core of everyday desire (an itch that simply cannot be scratched, at once frustration and engine).1 Ernaux wrestles with the ways in which, as she puts it, “[e]very photo is metaphysical” (96). Key to that metaphysics is the way photography images convey something of this “nothingness.” This “nothingness” is both a sense of death's inevitability and a related impossibility of our conceiving of that inevitability. This “nothingness” flags a disconnect between any form of representation and the experiences toward which representation gestures. For Ernaux, photography is also yet another example of technology's rapid restructuring of human life and subjectivity. Ernaux finds digital photography, in particular, to be problematic; although the internet can serve as “the royal road for the remembrance of things past,” the memory thus accessed is a different sort of memory than analog memory—less sensory, certainly, but more surface level and unconsidered, as well. The digital archive becomes an “infinite present” to human detriment (2017, 212). One collects digital images, but the construction of the archive becomes more important than the images themselves. “There were too many images for us to stop at each and recall the circumstances in which they were taken,” she writes in The Years. The proliferation of photography and photographic images, rather than heightening experience or serving as an aid for memory, has diminished both. “With digital technology, we drained reality dry” (2017, 213). There is an echo of this archive fever in The Use of Photography, too. Even though they are dealing only with analog technology, which requires a wait for the pictures to be developed by a professional, Ernaux and Marie nonetheless find themselves addicted to the act of taking pictures, “in a state of photographic frenzy,” which is “like an accelerating loss. The proliferation of photos, while intended to ward off the loss, only deepens it” (81). Yet the practice of photography is only half of the work of this book. Photography and writing, while both redolent of the “nothing” that is death and the failure to really re-experience or represent experience, nonetheless “give greater reality to moments of pleasure that were fleeting and impossible to represent” (6). Ernaux is concerned with how photography is like writing—or how thinking about photography can serve to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of writing. In particular, she sees the imagination as central, with imaginative engagement resisting the “nothing” so central to representation. On this centrality of imagination, she goes so far as to insist that writing and photography each function like fiction. In A Woman's Story, Ernaux describes her own surprise at rereading “the first pages of this book,” encountering her own life, frozen on the page. “I was amazed to discover that I had already forgotten some of the details” surrounding her mother's death (1992, 89). Yet, at the same time, rereading about her mother's death also leads to an emotional distance: “The emotions I feel are the same as if someone else had written it” (1992, 31). To write, according to Ernaux, is to experience “again the times and places we shared when she was alive.” But this is, at best, a simulacrum of such experience (1992, 55). Ernaux ends A Woman's Story with the statement, “I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world” (1992, 31). But it is a very different sort of birth—an image Ernaux returns to at the end of The Use of Photography, where she describes a full day of sex culminating or encapsulated in a memory that should have been a photograph: “I was crouched over M., his head between my thighs, as if he had just come out of my belly. It occurred to me at the time that there should have been a photo. With the title Birth” (133). No photograph is needed, really, for the transmutation of memory into something else here happens via language. “Birth,” moreover, reels with associations, shuttling us from the particular moment to something universal, cosmic, akin to Courbet's The Origin of the World. This painting also plays a role here, one of Ernauz's earliest memories of beginning to think about sex and art together—about sex and the organs of sex as gateways to experience and knowledge. my right breast and the submammary fold are a brownish color, burnt by cobalt, with blue crosses and red lines drawn on the skin to precisely indicate the area and the points to be irradiated. At the same time, I have been prescribed a postoperative chemotherapy protocol that is different from the previous one, and, every three weeks, for five days in a row, even at night, I have to wear a kind of harness, a belt around my waist with a fanny pack containing a plastic bottle, in the shape of a baby bottle, filled with chemotherapy products. It has a thin transparent plastic tube coming out of it, which threads up between my breasts to the collarbone, ending with a needle stuck into a catheter and covered by a dressing. Strips of adhesive tape hold the tube in place against the skin. Its heat causes the chemo liquids to rise and flow through my veins. Because of the bag on my belly, I cannot close my jacket or my coat and I have difficulty hiding the plastic tubing attached to the bottle and threaded up under my sweat. When I am naked with my leather belt, my vial of poison, my multicolored markings and the tube running across my upper body, I look like an extraterrestrial. (73) The book is a memoir of cancer, albeit one told in fragments and via a slant approach. As Ernaux says, writing about these photographs “authorized me to write about the cancer,” the structure of joint responses to the images allowing her “the chance to create a minimal narrative out of this reality” (48). This book serves as her chance to reflect on having moved beyond cancer—having had cancer, even as, in a characteristic sense of confusion related to chronology and writing, she is left unclear about “At what point did I stop thinking and saying, ‘I have cancer,’ and start to say, ‘I had cancer’?” (131). Writing does not merely chronicle life; it is its own mode of living in the temporary exclusion of death—“When I was writing I forgot that I could die,” she says (97). Sex surpasses writing in precisely this regard; it is an act of life exclusive of death. Of a photo that records notes and pages of writing scuttled off a desk so the surface could be used for coupling, Ernaux says: “If I'd had to choose between making love with M. and preserving my pages of notes, it is not them I would have chosen/I thought, ‘He makes me live above cancer’” (56). In this way, too, the sex organs represent a “birth” of consciousness, a source of both life and living. Here is where Ernaux may be of most interest to religionists, in this exploration of the effervescence of certain moments, and in exploration of the impossibility of even capturing or recalling or describing such moments, an impossibility she links to the concept of the erotic, a trajectory of extended jouissance. Ernaux herself sees traditional religion—at least French Catholicism—eclipsed by sex. In The Years, she writes that “[b]y losing sex, its main field of endeavor, the Church had lost everything. Outside of philosophy courses, the idea of God was neither indisputably valid nor a serious matter for debate” (2017, 146–147). There is a lot happening in these sentences, with sex identified as more central to institutional religion than theological speculations. God may be a frivolous intellectual topic these days, Ernaux argues, but the truer religious concern, that of coupling bodies, of lust and longing and furious culmination in the flesh—that remains livelier than ever, liberated as it was from Church control. It may not be a novel argument, but for Ernaux, the true core of religion continues to be her prime concern. Sex is both central to and a heuristic for understanding her other practices, namely writing and photography. In this book, Ernaux is attempting serious artistic and philosophical work. Marie's contributions are, to be generous, less interesting. While Ernaux sometimes stumbles—comparing the crumpled masses of castoff clothing to Rorschach tests is an uninspired moment—Marie's segments never soar. Shoes, for Ernaux, are opportunities to reflect on the disconnect between clothes and bodies, to muse on domination as an aspect of sex. Marie, on the other hand, observes that in the time it takes him to undo his boots, his “excitement had ample time to subside, reducing my sex to its limp everyday demeanor.” He longs “to permanently adopt the kind of outfits used by quick-change artists. Snap fasteners, Velcro, zippers” (42). That's as good as it gets from him. Ernaux says of undergarments: “Photographing them seemed to me a way of restoring dignity to these things that we keep so close—an attempt, in a way, to make them our sacred ornaments” (121). Marie says of the project: “I don't know what these photos are. I know what they embody, but I don't know what they're for” (130). Marie, at least, is here for Ernaux. As she writes in these pages, “Every man I've been involved with seems to have brought me some kind of revelation,” and being with a man ultimately serves her “desire to know,” a desire deeper than the sexual, though not separate from it (57). These pieces gesture toward a kind of knowledge, though, even in accumulation, they offer only hints. In this way, they are like the accidental arrangements of abandoned clothes that serve as prompts for the miniature essays. “Against the pale green background of the carpet,” she writes, “a purple, pink, and black bra, black stockings with a wide lace border, and a suspender belt are tangled together in a disturbing jumble that forms a floral composition” (119). This is reality, not art, Ernaux insists, but it is also only a trace of a memory, a fleeting “composition” that, in attempting to reconstruct a lost moment, reiterates how much is truly impossible to grasp even as it serves to invite the viewer/reader into an imaginative engagement. In this way, the clutter of undergarments on the carpet is also an “origin of the world,” a relic of the exuberance of life and, thus, for those who contemplate it, the opportunity for a kind of (re)birth. As Ernaux observes at one point in this book, another instance where only clothes remained, traces of an ineluctable event, was, as “it is said in the Gospel according to John,” inside the tomb of Christ (96). It is a comparison she quickly abandons, moving on, moving past, musing on the next page about the impossibility “to conceive of my death,” wherein she insists that “the only thing that can justify scientific and philosophical endeavor, and art, is not knowing what nothingness is.” She goes on, speaking of her own writing on sex and her own photographs of discarded clothes and her own writing on those images: “And if the shadow of nothingness, in one form or another, does not hover over writing, even of a kind most acquiescent to the beauty of the world, it doesn't really contain anything of use to the living” (97, 98)

Aesthetics · Art · Photography · Visual arts · Photography and Visual Culture