‘The Use of Photography’: Practising Aesthetic Intimacy
Gorgeous and raw, The Use of Photography, by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, and the once obscure photographer Marc Marie, chronicles their shared, “unknown laws” of lovemaking through a combination of photography and short prose accompaniments. While the memoir’s premise of two lovers told around fourteen, black-and-white, post-coital pictures, really carries the potential for a contrived, noir atmosphere, these still lives are anything but ornamental. Not only are these pictures plain and familiar in their modesty; this meditation on “a new erotic practice” uses photography as a medium for what cannot be said, provoking the free and open contemplation of loss, freedom, and relationships.
As the pair navigate the unveiling of each other’s bodies, both in sex and Ernaux’s journey through intensive recovery from chemo, there evolves a celebration of (and a need for) a greater kind of the external, a self beyond self. The book is composed as a series of photographs, taken either by Ernaux or Marie (yet never attributed to either) and accompanied by a short passage from both, written separately. These passages include both a reading of the image, as well as, perhaps with even more clarity, an account of scenes outside of the photograph - short diary-style narratives with initially little obvious relevance. In the introduction, Ernaux describes her fascination with the clothes left discarded on the floor after a night spent with Marie. How these castoff elements of themselves, scattered, hint to a body that no longer remains, a structure she reads as bearing some resemblance to herself, and yet she must pick them up, dressing, tearing the scene apart, to carry on. From this came the desire for the photograph, one shared by Marie: memorializing this representation that should otherwise, by nature, be fleeting.
Reading this novel, I am struck by the stylistic yet utilitarian quality of Ernaux’s writing. The use of accessible language, addressing her readers as in conversation, renders her bare to all in the democratic way of the nude: stark and only limited by your willingness to look. It’s all hers but not entirely her own, acting to publicly memorialise “the objective trace of … pleasure.” Provoked by a black leather boot, papers swept off a desk, and discarded stockings: Ernaux arranges this tableau of intimacy in layers of the mundane, opening each set of accompanying prose with a comprehensive account of the photograph’s features. We can see it, but she wants to tell us anyway as if it demands to be told despite narrative conventions. She is free of the perceived need for the memoirists to hollow themselves out, producing all the intimate details to grip the reader. Ernaux doesn’t bid to spread herself enticingly across the pages, she is instead, openly exposed before you without particular interest. These photographs, and their accompanying monologues, encourage their reader to value the photo for all that it is, allowing all else not represented, the “before, during, and just after,” to go. When there wasn’t the “time to make love. The photo was the thing we did instead”; Ernaux further liberates us to impart judgement free of situational context. In reinterpreting these scenes from something symbolic of an act to something now with their own meaning outside of representing ‘just’ a scene, there is permitted the effect of total aesthetic freedom, for both viewer and creator.
“One day M. and I will no longer mix ours,” Ernaux writes, referring to the worn-down black leather boots pressing on a white-patterned red bra captured in the photo, ‘a secret’: bringing this exploration of liberated intimacy to fulfilment. Although described as “an illustration of male domination,” the narrative permits an image of vulnerability, displaying how the things we use to perform ourselves may be taken off and observed, just as we may be observed without them. The ‘illustration’ is the resonance of a transient thing. Clothes mark a body that once was. So as with a secret, the body has the freedom to be broken, to be released (of course, this is a somewhat idealistic notion). As the body is allowed to temporarily cease to have value, there is a tension acting between the permanency of photographs and the random scattering of clothes possessing meaning for themselves as symbols, incorporating the lover and its ephemeral actions with the euphoria of something greater, something outside of themselves.
Their image is formed together, spontaneously, then taken together, first viewed together, but read apart—for neither Ernaux nor Marie consulted the other party in writing their captions. Originally published in 2005 by Gallimard in France as Ernaux’s “proof of life”: the need to establish oneself as just that - one - feels ever more relevant in the 2024 English translation. Clearly, in publishing this edition for a new English-speaking audience, this life has new potential for recognition. But one finds Ernaux’s renunciation of her partner’s influence, and her influence upon her partner, as written before the era of “Lean In” female ‘independence’, even more profound. For, Ernaux pushes for individual independence, non-contingent on gender as a theme - while simultaneously navigating the stakes of her life she suffers very literally on account of her sex, breast cancer.
They come together in a blessed carnality, “baptizing this sacred space” with the all-familiar “desire to know,” and are then free to inhabit this mystical knowledge independently, owing nothing to each other. Yet this is more than what we might think of as purely sexual, or even a play on muses, for their freedom is reflected in this relationship. In a display of total autonomy, each author admires the other while contemplating this coming together entirely independently, practising where and how to cast their interests. No certain need or meaning can knowingly be authorised of these photographs, not even by the people who ‘made’ them. So, they exist for free contemplation, and are, in this way, known to be beautiful.
In The Use of Photography, Ernaux and Marie satisfy the need to see an egoless relationship, one of an aesthetic nature, free from base needs and open to loss. Despite the sound of the instructional title, no instruction is needed, for the use of photography is inherent to the art. “For me,” says the darling of Fitzcarraldo Editions, “writing suspends all sensations other than those it brings to life and shapes”: her writing is a kind of focused suspension of the self. While reaffirming how crucial the external is through the honouring of what is removed, the temporary respite from certain corporeal failings (as Ernaux navigates the loss of her hair and natural breasts as a result of cancer treatment) reads as particularly poignant in what feels like a period of intense gender-based and racialised trauma. So often the external can feel like a betrayal, a pervasive dominance in which one is lost and entrenched in unwanted signifiers; what our bodies are thought to mean. In turning to the two-dimensional photograph, and its narrative failings of so many “unknowns,” Ernaux and Marie address the irony of believing we, as observers, can invest the objects of “a moment essentially impossible to circumscribe,” with meaning. Instead, we mutually exist with this trace of the objective in a happy way of the fleeting, aesthetically intimate.
Edited by Oisín McGilloway, Editor-in-Chief
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