The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie's L'usage de la photo
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666280802047711
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. – While Jefferson Hunter has proposed the term ‘photo text’ to refer to ‘composite publications evoking a landscape or recording a history, celebrating a history or mourning a loss’, Marsha Bryant prefers the term ‘photo‐text’, joining the two constituents together to avoid the ‘hidden bias’ inherent in the term ‘text’, itself. She notes that, ‘the double sense of text as written language and the site of interpretation makes Hunter's term a slippery one’. See, respectively, Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth‐Century Photographs and Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 1–2, and Marsha Bryant, ed., Photo‐Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 11. The particular spelling of the term that I propose here is meant to accept, and even embrace, that inherent ‘slipperiness’, and refers, more generally, to those cultural artifacts (explicitly hybrid or, as we shall see, otherwise) that enable us to explore the reciprocity of the two media under consideration from within one, singular work. My understanding of the ‘phototext’ considers, then, the photographic specificity of the ‘imagetext’, a term that designates, quite simply, ‘composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text’. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 89, n. 9. 2. – As Victor Burgin points out, ‘Even a photograph which has no actual writing on or around it is traversed by language when it is “read” by a viewer’. ‘Looking at photographs’, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 131. 3. – ‘A photograph could also be described as a quotation’. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 71. Others, like Roland Barthes, in one of his earliest discussions of photography, highlighted, contra‐Sontag, how the medium differs from language (‘photography’, as he wrote in ‘The Photographic Message’, is ‘a message without a code’.) For a helpful discussion of the debate see Mitchell, Picture Theory, pp. 281–5. 4. – I borrow the notion of the ‘hieroglyph’ from Tom Conley's discussion of films that encourage reading (and writing), specifically his focus on those moments where alphabetic writing crops up within the frame of the moving image. See Conley, Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 5. – ‘The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else; its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial. The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art. And it is in choosing and accosting his story, or subject, that the artist‐photographer makes the decisions crucial to his art.’ This also helps to explain Greenberg's famous dismissal of photography, which he felt was too transparent, too intimately tied to the world it represents, indeed too indexical really to be considered in the same category as painting. Clement Greenberg, ‘Four photographers’, New York Review of Books, 23 January 1964. Quoted in William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post‐Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 192. 6. – Or roman‐photo, depending on one's understanding of that equally complex term. See, for example, the discussion in Jan Baetens, Du roman‐photo (Mannheim and Paris: Medusa‐Medias et Les Impressions nouvelles, 1992). 7. – Barthes, ‘The third meaning’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Steven Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), p. 66, n. 1. 8. – Marie‐Françoise Plissart, Droit de regards (Paris: Minuit, 1985). 9. – I am thinking of those hard to place composite texts like Barthes's Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), or John Berger and Jean Mohr's Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 10. – Daniel Grojnowski, Photographie et langage (Paris: José Corti, 2002), p. 96. 11. – Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, L'usage de la photo (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 2005). References to selected pages will be made in parentheses. Translations of quoted passages are my own, unless otherwise noted. 12. – These are not the only photographs that figure in the text. Others, like a shot of Marc Marie's erect penis (p. 19), of both Ernaux and Marie in Brussels (p. 55), or of Marie's ex‐girlfriend (p. 158) are mentioned and described, but not reproduced. 13. – In their reactions to the same photograph (the one reproduced on p. 130), both Ernaux and Marie invoke Barthes's famous notion of the punctum (without referencing this term outright). For Ernaux, ‘There is always in a photo a detail that attracts our gaze, a detail that is more moving than others’ (p. 132). For Marie, in each image, ‘one detail dominates’. In this case, for both, a pair of white mules is what catches the eye. 14. – Consequently, much of what I shall have to say about the text focuses on Ernaux's text alone. 15. – See Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chapter 4. 16. – For a concise history of this fascinating debate, see James Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 54–9. 17. – To borrow from Barthes's theorization of the ‘ça a été,’ that ‘having been there’ quality that marks all photographs with a ‘certificate of presence’. See Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 87. 18. – There is something faintly criminal in the way the photographs appear here, not unlike those Eugène Atget streetscapes that Walter Benjamin so famously referred to as ‘scenes of a crime’. As Marc Marie notes in his first intervention, the lovers made sure not to touch or displace any of the clothing before snapping the shutter, ‘Like cops after a murder’ (p. 40). 19. – Indeed, as Hervé Guibert wrote, ‘the image is the essence of desire’. See Guibert, L'Image fantôme (Paris: Minuit, 1981), p. 89. Translation mine. 20. – W.J.T. Michell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xv. 21. – Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, p. 49. 22. – The full citation is as follows: ‘We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of he Author‐God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.’ Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Image, Music, Text, p. 146. 23. – My understanding of interphototextuality, therefore, veers from Williams Irwin's condemnation of a kind of ‘banal and idiosyncratic’ intertextual reading in which ‘intertextual speculations quickly degenrate into the déjà lu, pseudointellectual cocktail talk of the type, “This reminds me of that and so on”.’ See Irwin, ‘Against intertextuality’, Philosophy and Literature, 28 (2004), p. 236. 24. – Quoted in Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 36. Of course, this paper has focused (and will continue to focus) much of its attention on French enunciations of the phototext not merely because, as the veritable birthplace of photography, French writers and artists have been exploring the virtues of the medium for a very long time, but also, and perhaps more simply, because it is the literary and artistic tradition that I know best. 25. – André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 13–14. How ‘real’ a photograph's representation of the world might seem has been an object of critical contention for many years. See, for example, Joel Snyder's brilliant critique of the ‘realist fallacy’ in ‘Picturing vision’, Critical Inquiry, 6/3 (1980), pp. 499–526. 26. – Bazin, p. 9. 27. – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. 28. – Fleischer, p. 14. 29. – Fleischer, p. 15. 30. – Philippe Dubois, for example, develops the idea of still photography as a kind of ‘thanaphotography’. See Dubois, L'acte photographique (Paris and Brussels: Nathan & Labor, 1983), p. 160. For her part, Susan Sontag writes, ‘Photographs state innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people’. See Sontag, On Photography, p. 70. See also, among others, Christan Metz's discussion of the many ways photography is ‘linked with death’ in his article ‘Photography and Fetish’, October, 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81–90. 31. – The epigraph reads: ‘L'érotisme est l'approbation de la vie jusque dans la mort’. 32. – Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), p. 3. 33. – Further along, another photograph seems so abstract that it faintly registers with Ernaux. Her choice of words here, though, suggests precisely how much she has mortality on her mind: ‘[The photo] stirs up nothing in me. There is no longer here any life nor time. Here I am dead’ (p. 188). 34. – Pierre Saint‐Amand devised this generic term to describe a particular kind of life‐writing that integrates (in words or, quite literally, in pictures) a collection of personal photographs. See Saint‐Amand, ‘Mort à blanc: Guibert et la photographie’, Le Corps textuel d'Hervé Guibert, ed. Ralph Sarkonak, Au Jour le siècle, 2 (1997), pp. 81–95. 35. – Guibert, p. 161. 36. – Annie Liebovitz's latest book adds a moving photographic dimension to Sontag's illness in its inclusion of a number of images that document the critic's own struggle with cancer. See Liebovitz, A Photographer's Life: 1990–2005 (New York: Random House, 2006). 37. – In her own, very personal (yet no less critical) reading of L'usage de la photo, Martine Delvaux relies on a different set of interphototexts. Her exploration of the Ernaux/Marie collaboration through the lens of Georges Didi‐Huberman's Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992), proves especially convincing and, indeed, reveals quite a bit about how she reads. See Delvaux, ‘Des images malgré tout: Annie Ernaux/Marc Marie, L'usage de la photo’, French Forum, 31/3 (2006), pp. 137–55.
Referência(s)