Capturing the Romance Between Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s collaborative project, The Use of Photography, explores the potential of the photographic medium to grapple with existential questions. Reissued this month by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Seven Stories Press, the book documents a passionate love affair between Marie, a journalist, and Nobel Prize winner Ernaux, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Their shared project – one of photographing their romantic entwinement via crumpled heaps of clothing and Dr. Martens boots, light spilling through hazy windows after a night of lovemaking – also steers the reader into a reckoning with photography’s deep entwinement with mortality.

The Use of Photography is a testament to our encounters with illness, frailty, loss and the long shadow of mortality.

In Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), the theorist notes that an erotic photograph does not make ‘the sexual organs into a central subject’. Rather, what ‘animates’ us is what lies beyond the photographic frame in our imaginations. Not only a record of love, The Use of Photography is a testament to our encounters with illness, frailty, loss and the long shadow of mortality. The couple chose 14 photographs to write responses to, giving the images – and, by extension, their relationship – ‘substance’, as Ernaux terms it. In the following extract, Ernaux and Marie’s prose, translated by Alison L. Strayer, notes how ‘photos cannot capture a span of time […] they lock you into the moment.’

— Vanessa Peterson

one or two songs

Again, morning light on this scene from the night, in the lounge part of the living room. To the left, in profile, the mass of the sofa covered in an orange damask fabric, to the right a small coffee table with twisted gold legs on a blue carpet. In the background, the bottom of an open French window, the tiled floor of a balcony, the legs of a rattan table. On either side of the French window, the bottom shelves of the bookcase, barely visible, and a strip of midnight blue curtain. In this busy decor, a few items of clothing form fragile little heaps. Light summer things on the sofa, something that looks like a black shirt or T-shirt, a piece of brightly coloured fabric sliding down the cushion, and on the carpet, a dress or skirt of the same fabric rolled up with a pair of beige trousers. Two white high-heeled mules walk toward the sofa. A little to the side are a pair of tan boat shoes, the left one resting on top of the right, like the shoes of adolescents in class when they’re thinking about their papers, twisting their legs around each other. On the table, unreadable newspapers, an ashtray and a glass half-filled with white wine. The armrest cover has fallen off the sofa.

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. Here it’s the white mules in front of the French window. It is already very hot, the summer to follow will be that of the ‘great heat wave’ and when it’s over thousands of old people will have died and been buried, even on Sundays, but for the time being, it was simply the most magnificent summer we had seen for a long time. The world under a white sky will shimmer all over, surreal, and morality will dissolve, as usual, in the heat.

We’ll have dinner outside and I’ll walk down the stairs to the garden, incredibly light in those white mules, with the music from the stereo turned up full blast, and this time I’ll be thinking, ‘Another beautiful summer.’ Because for me all beauty, hope, and sadness are in that word ‘summer’, and the titles of films in which it appears pierce my heart, Summer with Monika, One Summer of Happiness, Summer of ’42. Summer, by dint of the word that designates it in the French language – été – is always experienced as already over. Summer can only have been. I was dazzled to be able to be so happy, to feel the same as at eighteen, when I had to live everything right away, as if I were going to stop being young once autumn arrived. In the garden, through the open windows, we heard Bryan Ferry, Elton John, Michel Polnareff, The Beatles.

The white mules are stopped in their tracks, and the music has died away.

A song is expansion into the past, a photo is finitude. A song is the happy sensation of time, a photo its tragic side.

Each season of our love affair is marked by a song or two that we never knew would be the one – the ones – to convey and indelibly condense the elusive succession of days.  

In the winter there was: William Sheller, ‘Un homme heureux’

Alain Souchon, ‘La vie ne vaut rien’

In the spring: Elton John, ‘The One’

Fiona Apple, ‘I Know’

In the summer: Bryan Ferry, ‘These Foolish Things’

In the autumn: Art Mengo, ‘Je passerai la main’ (but not for M.)

Elton John, ‘Tonight’

In the other winter: Mahalia Jackson, ‘In the Upper Room’

Christina Aguilera, ‘The Voice Within’

These songs will always be linked to M., as others are to other men for me, and to other women, for him. We should be wildly jealous of songs. It’s enough to hear one by chance, in a shopping mall 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 just with songs and photos.  

(Will I remember a song associated with the writing of this text? No matter how I search, I can’t think of a single one that could have played that mnemonic role. None that makes me say, ‘That was when I was writing Cleaned Out, or Simple Passion.’  For me, writing suspends all sensations other than those it brings to life and shapes.)

heat wave

It is morning. On the table, the remains of the previous night: an ashtray that is certainly full, a half-filled glass of white wine, my little rimmed glasses that I left there, probably when we started to undress. There, concentrated on the marble surface, are the first gestures of a myopic smoker who is about to make love, crushing out his cigarette, disposing of his glasses, though without them he will miss part of the show. Our footwear indicates that we have entered a different climatic universe: white mules for A., slip-ons for me. Not a sock in sight.

In the background, near the window, are my light baggy cotton pants. In front of them, the skirt or top of the gauzy outfit A. often wears when the weather’s hot. And it must be very hot. The heat wave has already begun, having arrived at the end of March. I realise that if I can date it with such precision, it is only thanks to the Salon du Livre, where I accompanied A. for a book signing. I can picture us on the same balcony that appears in the background. It was a Sunday, and the thought of having to get dressed and into the car, logging forty kilometres of asphalt along with a hefty dose of carbon dioxide, finding a place to park at Porte Maillot, and taking the Métro to Porte de Versailles, made us want only one thing—to enjoy the sunshine and the view over the Oise, and not go. We felt like school kids desperately looking for an excuse to get out of the History-Geography test. As my memory is quite faithless, I depend on the rare obligations that A. agreed to, the trips taken because of invitations, that I am able to reconstruct the order of events in the photos.

As with each of the photos we selected, not by virtue of aesthetic criteria but because they seemed to us representative of a moment in our history, one detail predominates – and it is not the interplay of colours between the fabric of the sofa, the carpet, and the outfit A. wore that evening, nor even my shoes, whose tones match those of the coffee table (an old piano bench?), but this pair of mules, startlingly white. They seem to be following each other, walking one behind the other. It was an evening when we did not have dinner inside but in the garden. And though the mules seem to be heading for the sofa, I mainly see them coming down the stairs to the room I call ‘the crypt’, which has cork-covered walls and for me is no more than an antechamber to our summer dinners on the lawn.

Photos cannot capture a span of time. They lock you into the moment.

On either side of the French window, the edges of the living room bookshelves can be seen. From left to right, viewed in full, they hold French literature, foreign literature, sociology, all in alphabetical order. When I first saw this, I wondered how anyone could take the slightest pleasure in browsing through these books when their arrangement criteria are the same as those of a public library. At my place, and in my parents’ house, books were arranged according to affinity or theme, with Thomas Mann within range of Proust, and Fitzgerald next to Hermann Hesse. Over time and frequent visits to Cergy, I got used to it. But with most of my books still in boxes, I don’t know what my ‘ideal literary space’ will end up looking like.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 246 with the headline ‘What Could Have Been’

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s The Use of Photography is available from Fitzcarraldo Editions from 10 October

_{Main image: Courtesy: Fitzcarraldo Editions; photograph: Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie}