In 2021, the renowned French author Annie Ernaux published Exteriors, a random selection of journal entries written while she lived for a time in the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. It stands apart from the books that have made her reputation as a fearless chronicler of her own life and relationships – the likes of Simple Passion (1993), Happening (2001) and A Girl’s Story (2020) – eschewing the unflinchingly intimate and semi-autobiographical approach that helped earn her the Nobel prize in literature in 2022. Instead, as its name suggests, Exteriors is detached and outward-looking. Her aim, she said, was to “describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to perceive the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered”.
Despite its oddly academic-sounding title, The Use of Photography – note the singular – bears little relation to its predecessor, being a return to the intensely personal style for which Ernaux is revered. The difference here is that, although the lens is once again turned on herself, her reflections – on desire, illness, memory and encroaching mortality as well as photography – are juxtaposed with those of her former lover Marc Marie, a journalist and photographer with whom she had a prolonged and passionate love affair in 2003. Rather than dilute the intensity of her prose, their to-and-fro conversation somehow works.
The arc of their relationship is sketched in a series of 14 snapshots that are, in essence, 14 variations on a single subject: their discarded clothes and shoes lying in a tangled jumble across the floors of various apartments and hotel rooms. On first encountering these scattered remnants of the fumbled and hurried prelude to their lovemaking, Ernaux was overcome, she writes, by “a sensation of beauty and sorrow” and immediately went to find her camera lest “this arrangement born of desire and accident” would simply disappear if not recorded.
Certain elements recur throughout: her fashionable mules, his unlaced work boots; her unfurled stockings, his crumpled denim jeans. (Oddly, the photos are printed in black and white throughout, despite there being several references in the texts to the colour of clothes and objects.) Blessedly, the sexual act itself remains out-of-frame throughout, both of them no doubt aware of French philosopher Roland Barthes’s insistence that, in photography, the erotic should be “a kind of subtle beyond”, evoking desire most powerfully by what it suggests rather than what it shows.
Intriguingly, Ernaux’s initial essay is a response to a photograph that she took but has chosen not to include: a closeup snapshot of her lover’s erect penis in which the camera flash “makes a drop of sperm glisten at the tip of the glans, like a bead”. The primary reason for the absence of visual evidence, it turns out, is privacy rather than propriety – “I can describe it, but I could not expose it to the eyes of others”.
The purpose of the almost mundane images that Ernaux and Marie chose to include – their primary use as intimated in the book’s definitive title – lies to a great degree in the prose they have inspired. They are not so much aide-mémoires as melancholy traces of their once fervent but now dissipated desire, which Ernaux retrospectively interrogates in her inimitable way. At one point, Marie compares them to a diary of “love and death”, but it is through the writing about them – melancholy, insistent, self-questioning – that the darker themes of mortality and loss fully emerge.
“When we started to take these photographs, I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer,” Ernaux tells us, matter-of-factly, in her short introduction. A few pages later, in the first essay proper, her forensic eye reveals the starkly intimate details of their first night together, which, like every aspect of her life at that time, existed in the shadow of her illness. “I didn’t take off my wig in bed. I didn’t want him to see my bald head. As a result of chemotherapy, my pubis was bald too. Near my armpit was a sort of protuberant beer cap, under the skin, a catheter implanted there at the start of treatment.”
Their love affair is punctuated with visits to the Institut Curie and the book details visceral descriptions of her physical and psychological condition, her punishing treatments and her acute sense of death’s imminence. Throughout this heightened interregnum, their intense couplings become a kind of defiance of the same. Self-pity, it goes without saying, is not her style. “I had told very few people about my cancer,” she writes at one point. “I wanted no part of the kind of sympathy which could never conceal, whenever it was expressed, the obvious fact that for others I had become someone else. I could see my future absence in their eyes.”
Against these passages of insight and stark revelation, Marie somehow holds his own as a collaborator. His writing is attuned to the formal aspects of the photographs, but also their limits in terms of what they can describe or evoke. Often they awaken fragments of memory from his own childhood. “My clothes are nowhere to be seen,” he writes of one image. “It’s as if I weren’t there, as if I were absent from the world as I was from all those joyless Christmases.” It was only when I retrospectively read his single line author biography at the start of the book, in which he is referred to in the past tense, that I realised Marie is no longer with us. He died in 2022. (The book was first published in France in 2005.) Ernaux recently told an interviewer: “I was notified of his death by a letter sent to me by his cardiologist.” His absence lends another layer of melancholy to their shared remembering.
Towards the end of the book, Ernaux asks herself the impossible question: “How do I conceive of my death… my non existence?” That, in turn, precipitates a short philosophical meditation on the unimaginable. “None of what awaits us IS thinkable,” she reflects, “but that’s just the point: there’ll be no more waiting. Or memory.” It is this “shadow of nothingness”, she concludes, that informs The Use of Photography and, indeed, all her work. Without it, she asserts, “writing, even of a kind most acquiescent to the beauty of the world, doesn’t really contain anything of use to the living”.