The Use of Photography
In The Use of Photography, the Nobel Prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux, following up on her recent book, The Young Man, continues her reporting of transient love affairs with randomly met men. In this new episode, her lover’s full name is disclosed, and he is made co-author of their adventure in copulation.
In The Young Man, Ernaux’s motivation for taking a stranger as a lover was her muse—the need to unblock a long deferred writing project. The relationship she initiates in The Use of Photography is driven by her desire to transcend the anguish and pain of her treatment for breast cancer and her fear of death. The book covers a year in their relationship, from their first dinner meeting at a Paris restaurant, to a final entry that marks the end of their project.
When Annie and Marc meet, he has just separated from a woman he loves, and she is in the midst of chemotherapy, wearing a wig to cover her baldness, and tagged with a catheter that drips chemicals into her body from a pouch attached to her waist. After dinner, she invites him to accompany her to her apartment, and their affair begins—lovers in search of escape from suffering.
Following one of their sessions of lovemaking, Ernaux is struck by the composition shaped on the floor of her apartment by their hastily discarded items of clothing—shoes, underwear, pants, a blouse, all shed in frantic urgency. She decides to take a photograph of the scene as a way of memorializing their moment of passion. When she shows Marc the photograph, he confides that he has had the same thought. They decide to make a ritual of photographing the detritus of their lovemaking. They establish and follow a strict protocol that puts them on the path to fetishizing their passion—a form of self-idolatry.
Their need to memorialize their lovemaking implies its transience, a theme that runs through this slim volume. In her commentary on the photos, Ernaux dwells on the transience not only of love, but of life itself, at one point writing, “I am a body inside of time. I cannot conceive of my exit from time.” For Ernaux, the sexual act is life affirming, the ultimate confirmation that she exists. She projects this conviction onto the universe, seeing in the physical world evidence of “the desire of a vanished god, his immense orgasm, the big bang in which he disintegrated.”
Ernaux and Marc agree to write separate commentaries on the photographs, then share them without permitting editing. These commentaries and the photographs that prompt them make up the contents of The Use of Photography. (Might not a better title for this book be A Use of Photography?) The scenes in the photographs—a selection of 14 from approximately 40—are the locations of their lovemaking over the course of their year-long affair. The settings are rooms in her Paris apartment, her house in Cergy, and hotel rooms in cities where they traveled.
Her commentaries always begin with a detailed description of the photograph, followed by reflection, often on her experience with cancer. Marc’s commentary frequently divulges his personal history and seems disconnected from Ernaux. Side by side following each photograph, the commentaries accentuate their fragile connection, their essential aloneness. Their lovemaking is almost never described—it is happening off stage in a timeless realm of memory that each of them preserves in distinct versions. Marc and Ernaux both assign a sacred quality to the images—memorials to the impermanence of their love.
Finally, this is a sad book, a lament from two people with a fixed notion of love that does not evolve beyond the marvel of physical union. Though the book is co-authored, it is Ernaux’s story, with Marc in a supporting role. At its heart lies Ernaux’s insecurity about love. She writes, “I wonder if contemplating and describing our photos is not a way of proving to myself that his love exists.” A love that needs proving is not a love fully lived. It leaves Ernaux in pursuit of “the question for which I see no answer, ’Does he love me?’”