Across fourteen photographs, clothes strewn in a moment of passion transfigure into lasting compositions. Empty shoes perch and keel over, bra straps lie tangled, rumpled pant legs sag where a knee or calf once jutted. The Use of Photography was first published in French in 2005 and is the most recent book by the author Annie Ernaux to be translated into English. In these snapshots that punctuate the book, absent bodies leave poignant traces.
Ernaux cowrote The Use of Photography with the journalist Marc Marie to record the detritus of a love affair between the two authors. Like many of Ernaux’s books it is preoccupied with the intricacies of intimate relationship. It presages the investment in photography that would come to structure one of her best-known works, The Years (2008), an experiment in collective autobiography that is scaffolded by family photographs. At the same time, the book takes stock of Ernaux’s treatment for breast cancer. Although none of the images directly portray her experience, neither author can refrain, as Ernaux writes, from “evoking the other scene playing itself out inside my body.” Indeed, the interpenetration of illness and desire, and the productive difficulty of capturing this relationship, animates the book. Responding to Marie’s assertion that Ernaux “only got cancer so [she] could write about it,” she reflects that “I felt that in a way he was right, but up until that point, I’d been unable to come to terms with this. It was only when I started writing about these photos that I was able to do so, as if writing about the photos authorized me to write about the cancer. As if there were a link between the two.” Although Ernaux does not define this link explicitly, gradually something does emerge: a humming triangulation of disease, photography, and writing that is suffused with desire.
Some of the most formative writing about photography—by the later twentieth-century critics who began to look beyond long-standing debates about photography’s status as an art form—dedicated itself to unearthing the medium’s exploitative power dynamics. Ernaux and Marie share this attunement to power, but they also manage to offer an alternative account of its nature, exposing the possibility (even if latent, and only imperfectly realized) that the medium could be governed by an erotic force as much as an extractive one. As the product of a joint endeavor, the project echoes Audre Lorde’s assertion that the erotic supplies “the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” Narrating the first stirrings of the project, Ernaux says that Marie shared her impulse to record their affair’s accruals, and the two began to fill envelopes with images. Before long, they decided to write about them. Selecting fourteen of their photographs, Ernaux and Marie wrote about each one in isolation, sharing their work only once it was complete. Their words remain separate in The Use of Photography—each image is followed by a short vignette from Ernaux, and then Marie—but the lovers’ aim is shared: “whether through photographs, or writing, we strove each time to give greater reality to moments of pleasure that were fleeting and impossible to represent. To capture the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.”
The erotic, of course, is not necessarily synonymous with the sexual. For Lorde, in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” the erotic is a deep attunement to feeling, “an assertion of the lifeforce of women.” By rooting us in authentic emotionality, the erotic opens us up to an honest assessment of our internal state, prompting a rigorous self-scrutiny that helps us move beyond societal constraints. Such honesty with oneself can also catalyze connection with others that lays the groundwork for solidarity. Lorde wrote the essay as a queer Black scholar navigating a patriarchal, racist academy that devalued felt knowledge, and her writing demonstrated that such clear-eyed self-understanding and firm solidarity threaten systems of oppression. Much of Ernaux’s writing across her oeuvre is devoted to voicing experiences like having an abortion and inhabiting romantic obsession, which were often silenced in the postwar France of her youth; The Use of Photography was composed against a backdrop of an alienating consumer culture, a system whose profit motive Lorde argues is inherently incompatible with the valuation of the erotic. Although they may not describe their project in such terms, Ernaux and Marie gesture towards Lorde’s assertion of the power of the erotic to destabilize such extractive forces. They approach their subjects with a clarity that is nevertheless steeped in emotion, and with an attunement to specificity that is nevertheless embedded in social life.
Image from Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s The Use of Photography, 2024.
Thanks to this precise orientation to their subjects, the erotic pervades the images included in the book as well as its structure. Even as Ernaux laments that “there is nothing of our bodies in the photos. Nothing of the love we made,” the careful attention lavished on these abandoned bundles of clothes lends them a vibrant sensuality. Looking at one image, in which a lacy purple bra and black stockings stand out starkly against a yellowing carpet that seems almost to glow, Ernaux writes, “I thought tenderly of the compositions formed by our clothes abandoned after lovemaking … Photographing them seemed to me a way of restoring dignity to these things that we keep so close.” Absent her own body, Ernaux’s tightly framed image nevertheless endeavors to capture the rich textures of its subject, endowing these inert clothes with renewed liveliness.
Ernaux’s and Marie’s writing approaches these images with enlivening tenderness. Such tenderness is not necessarily a familiar quality of photography as it has historically been theorized. In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag acknowledges the desire that might surround the photographic process, but she frames this desire as self-serving, almost brutal: “like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.” Similar to Laura Mulvey’s account of the voyeuristic male gaze, Sontag insists that “there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.” Yet Ernaux’s and Marie’s account of their impulses toward photography is mostly free of violence. In one evocative passage, Ernaux writes:
Ever since we started writing about these photos, we have been in a state of photographic frenzy. We want to “take” each other, constantly—at the dinner table, or on waking in the morning. It’s like an accelerating loss. The proliferation of photos, while intended to ward off the loss, only deepens it. The click of the camera is a strange catalyst of desire that pushes you to go further. When it’s me taking the photo, I feel a peculiar excitement in the handling and adjusting the zoom, as if I had a male member—I think that many women experience this sensation. Each time the shutter is released, my brain quivers with pleasure.
Sontag’s assessment of photography isn’t absent from these lines: here, in Ernaux’s frenzy, is Sontag’s addictive fantasy-machine. Here, too, is a gendered power play in which the camera is endowed with a masculine force. And yet, Ernaux describes photography as a pursuit of a visceral pleasure. It is tinged with the melancholy that attends the ephemerality of the present without diminishing its romantic allure. Loss follows upon loss. And yet, Ernaux and Marie still take up the camera searching for more.
Such rerouting of aggression into pleasure appears in Ernaux’s and Marie’s orientations toward illness as well. Reflecting on her treatment, Ernaux recalls that “for months, my body was investigated and photographed innumerable times from every angle and with every technique in existence,” and a footnote offers a litany of imaging devices: “mammogram; drill biopsy of the breast; ultrasound of the breasts, liver, gallbladder … I am probably forgetting a few.” Ernaux experiences this probing as a taxing violation: medical photography transformed her from a person into an object of study. Her description of this experience echoes what the poet Anne Boyer proclaimed in her memoir The Undying (2019): “We who become patients through the waves and stopped waves of sonograms, of light tricks and exposures, of brilliant injectable dyes, are by the power vested in me by having-a-body’s universal law now to be called the imagelings.” From people to patients to imagelings, Boyer’s lines underscore the depersonalizing effects of the diagnostic gaze of medical image-making.
The photographer and critic Allan Sekula understood this diagnostic gaze as belonging to the “bureaucratic-clerical-system of ‘intelligence’” around which photography is oriented. For Sekula, the production of the physiognomic taxonomies of people who were incarcerated was crucial to the development of photography as a medium. That surveillance impulse lies latent in everyday uses of the form. Even the most mundane snapshot can be evidence, a tool in an investigation that aims to, as Hervé Guibert wrote, “betray what is hidden beneath the skin.” Ernaux’s descriptions of her treatment remind us that this investigative impulse may always have been a diagnostic one, and she at first seems to take up Sekula’s claim that even nonclinical photographs are an attempt to gather evidence. Noting her fascination with telling stains, Ernaux writes, “I wonder if contemplating and describing our photos is not a way of proving to myself that his love exists, and in the face of the evidence, the material proof they embody, of dodging the question for which I see no answer, ‘Does he love me?’” Each snap of the shutter, along with bringing pleasure, can also be an attempt to capture proof, to complete the impossible task of burrowing inside the lover’s chest.
And yet, just as Sekula’s own photographic practice attempted to complicate the dynamics he analyzed, Ernaux’s and Marie’s sensually charged images evade the demands of surveillance. Their writing, too, facilitates this complication: once Ernaux and Marie surround their photographs with words, the repressive force of the diagnostic gaze begins to waver. Looking at a photograph in which a gray jacket and floral bra lie on the floor, Ernaux recalls, “when this photo was taken, my right breast and the submammary fold were a brownish color, burnt by cobalt, with blue crosses and red lines drawn on the skin to precisely indicate the area and the points to be irradiated.” Although this matter-of-fact language is in a sense an importation of the camera’s X-ray vision into prose, Ernaux’s attention to detail departs from the panopticism critiqued by Sekula. Lauren Elkin, in a profile of Ernaux for Lux Magazine, suggested that the “clinical acuity” of Ernaux’s writing demonstrates a commitment to her class politics and an awareness that “beautiful writing can be a way of ‘masking power.’” In this book, too, precise language can activate the truth-telling force of the erotic toward liberatory ends. Near the end of Uses, Ernaux points out that eleven percent of French women currently or formerly had breast cancer. “Three million breasts stitched, scanned, marked with red-and-blue drawings, irradiated, reconstructed, hidden under blouses and T-shirts, invisible,” she writes. “Indeed we must dare to show them one day. (Writing about mine is part of this unveiling.)” In this brief parenthetical, Ernaux uncovers the expansive possibilities of a mode of writing that borrows from photography’s own methods—here, the diagnostic gaze doesn’t violate bodies so much as it dispels isolating taboos.
Marie, grappling with the way that “for months we live together as a threesome, death, A., and me,” admits to an improbable optimism: “I know it’s almost too beautiful to believe, the old myth of love’s victory over death, but that’s the way it is.” Our current political climate represses embodied self-understanding—whether of one’s own gender identity or medical needs—making the triumph of the erotic over the exploitative too hopeful to believe. Under such conditions, the snapshots and vignettes that pry open a window of possibility for such a triumph feel all the more crucial.
