Unknown Structures

Jonathan Alexander considers the English translations of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s “The Use of Photography” and Hervé Guibert’s “Suzanne and Louise.”

By Jonathan AlexanderMarch 12, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Nonfiction

AT THE END of The Use of Photography (published in French in 2005 and now available in Alison L. Strayer’s English translation), Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux reflects on the project she developed with her lover, Marc Marie: photographing evidence of their lovemaking, such as discarded clothes, and then writing separately about the pictures after they were developed. Seeing all the photos spread out before her, she writes, “Without thinking, I took a photo of the whole thing. Perhaps to give myself the illusion of capturing a whole. All of our story. But it’s not there.” Such a seemingly simple request of the photographs: tell us our story, the whole of our story. She and Marie had set out, many months before, to document their affair through these photos, establishing rules about the images, such as not moving the clothing around once the items—underpants, bras, shoes—had hit the floor. But of course, as poignant as some of the images might be, gesturing to the unseen lovers and their erotic play, the photographs are only traces. Even the photo of all the photographs together can only be an assemblage of traces. The “whole” of the story seems to be somewhere else, leaving behind scant evidence of a love affair that, we feel, is itself starting to unravel, to come undone, to disappear.

In the trace, though, lies the particular power of the photographs. By capturing a single moment, the photograph calls to mind all other moments, the befores and afters, surrounding a slice of time. In the temporal amber of the image, a space opens up for questions that quickly try to fill in the rest of the story: How did those underpants wind up on the floor? How did that bra come undone? Where are the people who so quickly seemed to have disrobed and cast aside their clothes? We might think of the photograph then as a metonym, a one-off stand-in for the totality of a life—of a love affair—otherwise incapable of being rendered in its totality.

The question of what exactly a photograph does and how it does it has generated some important critical and theoretical observations, from Walter Benjamin through Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, among many others. The latter two in particular seemed fascinated with the relationship between photography and time, their thoughts clustering especially around human finitude and death. Barthes meditates in Camera Lucida (1980) on an image of his dead mother, about which he writes at length while withholding the image from our view—though he does give us a photograph of a man in chains, condemned to death, the photo highlighting our sense of his impending demise. Not long before Barthes published his book, Sontag had written in On Photography (1977) that “photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.” The moment in time captured in a photograph throws into stark relief the inexorable passage of time, lending the subjects of the image a poignancy that might otherwise be missed in the day-to-dayness of life.

Increasingly, with the proliferation of digital cameras and sites devoted to the ceaseless documentation of posed selfies, meals, outings, and other mundane minutiae, this view of photography is starting to seem quaint. If anything, images are too much with us, the explosion of digital documents, manipulated or not, rendering our entire world a stage set for our latest adventures—the accumulating mass overwhelming us, becoming tedious even. The spectacle itself has become quotidian, and we do not just live in its society; we have become the spectacle, our lives instantly on internet parade.

In this context, the publication in English this past year of Ernaux and Marie’s The Use of Photography and Hervé Guibert’s Suzanne and Louise (1980; now translated by Christine Pichini and with an introduction by Moyra Davey), two collections of photos from the predigital age accompanied by text, might seem like a throwback, the vestiges of a former time of photographic poignancy. But the books speak less to that emotion (even if they do speak to it, admittedly) than to the staginess of photography in general, to the action of making images that renders life as theater—well before the selfie, the Instagrammable moment, the ubiquity of our contemporary spectacle. But what kind of spectacles are these?

Initially, at least, the poignancy of impermanence surrounds and perhaps even motivates Ernaux and her lover’s interest in photographing evidence of their lovemaking in varied venues—but never themselves, just their discarded underclothes or objects near the scene of sex. Ernaux writes in the introduction to The Use of Photography that she has trouble defining “the value or the interest of our undertaking” but that it may perhaps lie in the attempt “each time to give greater reality to moments of pleasure that were fleeting and impossible to represent” or to “capture the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.” She actually references the increasing use at the time of digital photography, noting that her and her lover’s project may be part of the “same frenzy for turning life into images that is increasingly characteristic of our age.”

But there are important differences. Ernaux and Marie agree not to “stage” the photographs but take pictures of their underthings as they happened to fall naturally on the floor. They then develop the photographs, choose some, and write separately about them, only sharing their writing much later. The book is composed of the chosen photographs and Ernaux’s and Marie’s meditations on the images. Ernaux’s texts always begin with a description of the photograph, an ekphrastic exercise: “There’s always a detail in the photo that grabs the eye, a detail more moving than others—a white label, a stocking snaking across the tiles, a lone sock rolled in a ball, a bra with its cups lying flat on the parquet, as if on display in a shop window.” Given that the two lovers write their sections separately, the meditations don’t quite create a dialogue but rather offer discrete, sometimes even divergent thoughts on the images and their occasion, the moments adjacent to acts of lovemaking.

The adjacency is important, for both the images and the writing. Everything we see and read is to the side of the principal action, photographed before or after and always written about in the aftermath. Already, even embedded in the rules of the “game” they have created, the possibility of capturing the totality of the affair will remain illusive. But that may be the point. Ernaux writes, “There is nothing of our bodies in the photos. Nothing of the love we made. The invisible scene. The pain of the invisible scene. The pain of the photograph. It comes from wanting something other than what is.” What is wanted here? What “other” is wanted whose absence generates the pain of the invisible scene?

With shades of Barthes and Sontag, Ernaux and Marie’s game suggests that the inevitability of death, even if just the death of their affair, generates some of this pain. The possibility of death is made very real when we learn that Ernaux is soon to undergo treatment for cancer, a treatment that will render her bald. The two continue fucking, recording Ernaux’s experiences of the treatment’s effect on their lovemaking, and the situation brings into closer proximity their sense of mortality; as Marie puts it when reflecting on one photograph, “Is it possible to feel nostalgic about a moment entirely conditioned by the possibility of death? That is what this photo says to me.”

But more: Marie actually tells Ernaux that she likely only got cancer so she could write about it. Ernaux herself writes, “I performed my task of cancer patient with diligence and viewed as an experience everything that happened to my body. (I wonder if doing as I do, not separating one’s life from one’s writing, does not mean spontaneously transforming experience into description.)” To be sure, Ernaux has spent nearly a lifetime rendering her life as a series of books, her existence transformed into words for others to read. But such rendering is not just documentation; her cancer and its treatments are not just topics and themes for recording. Rather, she says, “I don’t expect life to bring me subjects but unknown structures for writing. The thought ‘I only want to write the texts that only I can write’ refers to texts whose very form is provided by the reality of my life.” While her photographs and written meditations take shape out of the particularity of her experiences, one can’t help but think that those photographs and meditations also in turn help shape her life. She says, “When I look at our photos, it is my body’s disappearance that I see. However, what matters to me is not that my hands or face have ceased to exist, or that I can no longer walk, eat, or fuck. It’s the disappearance of thought.” Even in translation, that final sentence is enigmatic in a very French way, but it speaks at least partially to how Ernaux’s sense of self—and what she values, especially her ability to meditate and reflect on her life—assumes form in the process of mediation, of rendering even fragments of a life through photographs and writing.

Some of those reflections border on the maudlin: “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?’” At other times, they approach the grandiose, seeming to deny embodied limits even as the images testify to—indeed, are only possible because of—the attraction of bodies for one another: “We continue to take photos. It is an activity that can go on indefinitely since no two scenes are ever the same. Its only limits are those of desire.”

No two scenes—a curious phrase. Despite the lovers’ efforts to keep the photographs unstaged, references to the drama of the situation seep in. Ernaux refers to their activities and their documentation as a “private erotic theater,” and Marie reflects at one point that, in his own writing, he “was trying to encompass all the different dramaturgic layers of the play that we had just performed for ourselves alone.” But a drama for whom? Both Ernaux and Marie move toward publication of their images and writing, suggesting that other viewers and readers have become part of the audience. But questions linger. Marie offers the following, toward the end of the book: “I don’t know what these photos are. I know what they embody, but I don’t know what they’re for.” Whatever they may be for, he muses, they are not for showing on a mantlepiece. But they have brought a structure, even if it’s an “unknown structure,” in Ernaux’s words. They have staged, perhaps first and foremost for themselves, the significance of their affair.

The importance of “structures,” however initially unknown, is even more prominent in the other, older book, now also appearing in English for the first time. Hervé Guibert’s Suzanne and Louise is one of the French author and photographer’s earliest works, one he called a “photo roman.” Some years before he became famous for chronicling his demise from AIDS in vaguely autofictional books such as To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), Guibert wrote extensively about photography as a cultural journalist, penned a “response” to Barthes in the book Ghost Image (1981), and practiced photography himself. Some of Guibert’s most famous photographs are actually selfies, what he called autoportraits, and his last major work is a home video, La Pudeur ou L’Impudeur (Modesty, or Immodesty, 1991), chronicling his day-to-day living with late-stage AIDS.

Like The Use of Photography, Suzanne and Louise also has its origins in something of a game. Guibert regularly visits his two elderly great-aunts, one (Suzanne) a comfortably well-off widow living with the other (Louise), a former Carmelite nun, who essentially lives as her sister’s servant and caretaker. Their relationship is somewhat sadomasochistic, with the two rarely seeming to talk to one another except through their nephew. Guibert devises a scheme to photograph them regularly, perhaps even make a small movie of them. At times, the photographs, all black-and-white, achieve their own poignancy, capturing the challenges of the elder years; one striking photo of the two sisters in dark clothes pictures one sitting, one standing, both pairs of eyes downcast.

Guibert’s image-making proceeds from capturing his aunts in their daily activities to purposefully staging those activities. From the beginning, though, there is already something dramatic about the trio. In the text that Guibert writes to accompany the photographs, the narrator offers that “they perform, for him, a dramatization of their relationship. They seduce him; they are jealous. He keeps quiet and listens.” He won’t keep quiet for long, though. Guibert teases them both by saying he’s not only photographing but also writing about them (and he’ll write even more about them later in his short life). However, “[t]hey doubt that he’s really writing something about them, so they speak without restraint, almost extravagantly, with nothing to lose.” When he says that he intends to make a movie about them, the aunts initially resist, but then warm to the idea once they see the photographs: “Everything began to take off when I decided to print some photos, just to see, to show them. […] They were surprised by the images I revealed to them after so much time, after an interval of forty, fifty years. And so the work of posing, of mise-en-scène, could begin.”

The languages of photography and especially film—posing, mise-en-scène—signal the increasing staginess not just of the photographs but also of the developing relationship between the trio. Guibert acts more and more like a director. He asks Suzanne to pose as though dead, and we see her in photographs reclining on a sofa, corpse-like. He asks Louise to try on their deceased dog’s muzzle, which she consents to, mimicking the dog’s vocalizations in the process. Some of the more striking textual passages are actually about images that Guibert intended to capture but didn’t. He envisions taking a photograph of their dog being put down but tells us that “these photos were never taken, since Louise never called [him] that day.” He also imagines living in the aunts’ apartment after they have died, exactly as it is, without changing a thing: “I hesitate to write this fantasy down, for I am afraid, all of a sudden, that it will come true.” In perhaps the oddest (of many odd) sequences, we see reproduced the text of what is essentially a love letter that Guibert writes Suzanne. “The letter I might write you could be indecent,” it says, and then: “It feels like you speak to me, and that I speak to you, that we communicate better than we do with words, through these photographs. My dream, of course, would be to photograph your body.” Suzanne hides the letter but seems nonetheless thrilled by it.

The book ends with a fragment of the screenplay Guibert penned for the never-made movie that would chronicle this period of his great-aunts’ lives. But as with Ernaux and Marie, the activity of making images and writing accompanying text is never wholly about documentation, even if it seems to begin there. For sure, part of the impetus to document arises out of the proximity of death, especially given the advanced ages of the aunts: “I talk to them again about the film, since for me, rekindling the idea of a project with them gives me a reason to live, and defies death a little bit.” But another impetus, again akin to that of Ernaux and Marie’s, is the exploration of structures of meditation—structures that arise out of the act of rendering these lives in other media and the structures of relationality that emerge through the process of such rendering. Guibert’s sense of how to photograph his aunts extends beyond image-making to screenplays, imagined photographs, imagined films, and even an exhibit, not to mention the ultimately published book. And, in turn, the process of mediation doubles back onto his own—and his aunts’—understanding of their relationship, however fanciful, dramatic, and improbable. The density of Ernaux and Marie’s love affair is only matched by the drama of the hidden love letter between nephew and aunt—a letter likely never to have been written except to forward the drama of turning life into art.

Guibert’s photo roman is as much about writing—about understanding life as writing—as it is about the life of two elderly French women. Indeed, perhaps the book is not just about writing but also about multiple complex acts of mediation that parallel or serve as metonyms for living as well as give that living shape, form, and structure. To return to some of my opening thoughts, the proliferation of mediation in both books speaks less to what a photograph cannot capture and more to what it suggests—what it evokes—because it can ultimately capture so little. That little, perhaps, is what calls forth other acts of mediation, such as the accompanying writing, not only to fill in what is left out but also to see the lives rendered as oddly rich, even if at times pedestrian, dramas.

Ultimately, these books’ embrace of the theatricality of the quotidian isn’t surprising, given the body of work that their authors have produced. Ernaux has spent a lifetime documenting her various stages of existence, from love affairs to an abortion to her humble class background and eventual fame. Guibert wrote powerfully about his gay desires and then the tortures of living with HIV and AIDS, his books serving as some of the earliest testaments to the disease and its ravages. At the same time, what makes Ernaux and Guibert exceptional as life writers is that they are not merely archivists or documentarians of their experiences but also theorists of the process of rendering life as writing, or as a series of mediations. Our ceaselessly digitally rendered lives may speak ultimately to the mundanity of our daily spectacles, but Ernaux and Guibert (along with their collaborators) found a way, before the widespread use of digital cameras, to make images—and the limited slices of life they capture—powerfully dramatic.