Ernaux’s recently translated memoir meditates on photographs as material traces of love and endurance
‘I realize that I am fascinated by photos in the same way I’ve been fascinated, since childhood, by blood, semen and urine stains on sheets, or old mattresses, discarded on pavements; by the stains of wine or food embedded in the wood of sideboards, the stains of coffee or greasy fingers on old letters – the most material and organic kinds of stains.’ So writes Annie Ernaux in her recently translated memoir, The Use of Photography, coauthored with her then lover Marc Marie in 2003 (and first published in French in 2005), when Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Comprising 14 analogue photographs of thrown-off clothes in the different places where the couple met during their affair, along with their written reflections on each image, the resulting book meditates on the material traces of love and endurance.
In the snapshots, clothes are metonyms for bodies. At times, they encode and narrate the actions and movements of desires: a photograph of a crushed cigarette and a pair of glasses on the kitchen counter preserves ‘the first gestures of a myopic smoker who is about to make love’; the distance between a pair of overturned boots reflects ‘the force with which they were flung off’. In others, clothes are eerily human. When the couple went to clear the house of Marie’s late mother, it was her clothes that ‘remained suffused with the smell of the eau de cologne she used to excess’ and preserved the humanity that was otherwise lost. Shed from the bodies on whose shapes it is modelled, an item of clothing lingers between phantom and carcass, an artefact of impermanence, a memento mori to our vulnerable, corporeal being.
‘I don’t expect life to bring me subjects but rather unknown structures for writing,’ Ernaux writes. The book’s format is informed by a period of time in which passion and mortality are like two sides of the same coin – or the positive and negative of a photograph. Here, taking a photograph feels like an aspiration to preserve, and, written retrospectively, the text bears witness to that act of preservation – the time bracketed in between the two kinds of record-keeping is a testament to her survival, when death loiters just around the corner.
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover)
