Annie Ernaux

Marc Marie

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE An account of Annie Ernaux’s love affair with journalist Marc Marie while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their combined project to document images and memories. Includes 14 black and white photographs by the authors. Love and death cohabit in The Use of Photography. First published in France in 2005, the book recounts a passionate love affair between Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy. The affair took place in different locations and Ernaux describes how, shortly after it began, she found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place and the remains of their last meal of the evening still on the table—and how painful it felt to put things back in order afterward. She went and got her camera, and began to take photographs of the scenes of disarray. When she told Marc Marie what she had done, he said he had felt the same desire. The Use of Photography is one of the quintessential Ernaux books, told primarily through words in Ernaux’s inimitable style, which is adopted here by both authors, and with their photographs adding another lens through which to capture the story.

The Use of Photography

Ivana Varesko

Often, from the start of our relationship, on getting up in the morning, I would gaze in fascination at the dinner table, which had not been cleared, at the chairs out of place, our tangled clothes that had been thrown all over the floor the night before, while we were making love. It was a different landscape every time. Having to destroy it by separating and picking up each of our belongings made my heart heavy. I felt as if I were removing the only objective trace of our pleasure. 

A hotel room, with its double impermanence, temporal and spatial, is for me a place where the pain of love is felt most acutely. At the same time, I've always had the impression that making love in a hotel is without consequence because there, in a sense, you are nobody. 

Week after week, the photos accumulated, several dozen in all. The spontaneous act of taking photos became a matter of ritual. But always, at the moment when I collected my things and destroyed that harmony, my heart sank, as if each time I were desecrating the relics of a sacred place. To us it was as beautiful as a work of art, as remarkable for the play of colours as for the interaction between the diferent fabrics as if, though immobile for the moment, they were preparing to creep towards each other and perpetuate our gestures. The crime lay not in what we’d done, but in the action of undoing it. - M.

Waking up beside each other with no clothes or make-up on, breath sour and eyes full of sleep, can be a point of no return: you either rush into the shower and set your sights on going home as quickly as possible, or you stay for breakfast. - M

The click of the camera is a strange catalyst of desire that pushes you to go further. Each time the shutter is released, my brain quivers with pleasure. Anyone who does not also have an orgasm with the brain may not have experienced true pleasure. 

We should be wildly jealous of songs. It only takes hearing one by chance, in a shopping centre or a hair salon, to find myself transported not to a precise day but to a period of time whose changing skies and weather, diversity of world events, repetition of daily trajectories and actions - from eating breakfast to waiting on the Métro platform - have dissolved, as in a novel, into a single long day, cold or hot, dark or bright, coloured by a single sensation, of happiness or unhappiness. 

Photos cannot capture a span of time. They lock you into the moment. A song is expansion into the past, a photo is finitude. A song is the happy sensation of time, a photo its tragic side. I've often thought that one's whole life story could be told only through songs and photos.

The Use of Photography quotes

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