l’usage de la photo

salem.archive
26.0405

Annie Ernaux
Marci marie

2005 (Gallimard)

post

the colored version of the images found in “L’Usage de la Photo”

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“L’usage de la photo” is a photo essay co-written by Annie Ernaux, writer and Marc Marie, photographer. They met in 2003 and spent their first night together in bed on January 22nd after a diner on the left bank : He is recently broken up with his live-in girlfriend and She is undergoing treatment for cancer.
What follows is an affair as intense as it was unlikely, recorded by this book. The premise is simple: each morning after, a picture is taken of the garments collapsed on the floor and shoes kicked off mid-gesture, exactly as they are. Photographs of the aftermath, they are suspended somewhere between of burning desire and mortality.
Then, they write from the picture, separately, each tracing what the image stirs in them. The opposite of pornographic, yet at times resembling crime scene photographs, they attest to love’s sometimes violent needs, a meditation on the paradoxes of the medium of photography and passage of time.

+ my (worn) copy of the book from my master’s degree thesis