Romance Studies

ISSN: 0263-9904 (Print) 1745-8153 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yros20

'Un Coup de Foudre Photographique':

Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert

Akane Kawakami

To cite this article: Akane Kawakami (2007) 'Un Coup de Foudre Photographique':
Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert, Romance Studies, 25:3, 211-225, DOI:
10.1179/174581507x209597

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/174581507x209597

Published online: 19 Jul 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 14

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yros20

Download by: [The University of Edinburgh] Date: 20 August 2017, At: 05:58
 Romance Studies, Vol. 25 (3), July 2007

‘UN COUP DE FOUDRE

PHOTOGRAPHIQUE’: AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN HERVÉ GUIBERT

Akane Kawakami
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

This article explores the ways in which the photographic act is an autobiographical one. It shows how
photography and writing, historically considered to be rivals, co-operate to portray the self in the works
of Hervé Guibert. It examines most closely the instances in which this is achieved through depicting the
other, and demonstrates how the photographic act establishes different kinds of relationship between the
photographing self and the photographed other, ranging from pure exploitation to unselfish love, from
Oedipal attachments to mature friendships. Starting with an analysis of Proust and Barthes’s ideas on
photography, with specific reference to the role of the mother in their accounts, the article examines one
of Guibert’s photographs in Le seul visage as well as his writings on photography in L’Image
fantôme; it shows how such works, through their depiction of a much-loved other, can be said to
constitute acts of autobiography. It concludes by discussing how Guibert uses photography to chart the
map of love between possession and freedom.

La peinture, elle, peut feindre la réalité sans l’avoir vue. Le discours combine des signes qui ont
certes des référents, mais ces référents peuvent être et sont le plus souvent des ‘chimères’. Au
contraire de ces imitations, dans la Photographie, je ne puis jamais nier que la chose a été là.1

Ever since its invention, photography has had a creative but often tense relationship with
writing, chiefly because of its allegedly privileged connection to the real.2 The claim that
photography enjoys an unmediated link to reality, because it is a direct inscribing of it onto
a photosensitive surface, has been used both to extol and denigrate it: Baudelaire argued
that the photographer was no artist, given that all he did was carry out a mechanical action,
whereas Barthes envied photographs their closeness to their referents. This ‘referential’
quality has led to comparisons and competition between photography and the genre of
autobiography: if photography is the indisputable reflection of an object on film, autobio-
graphy is the true record of a life by the person who should know it best.3 Although
theorists of both photography and autobiography have shown that these are simplistic
views, the fictionality of autobiography and the artistry of photography now being
commonplaces in the relevant critical discourses,4 the two media seem sometimes still to be

Address correspondence to: Dr Akane Kawakami, Birkbeck, University of London, French Section, SLLC,
43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London wc1h 0pd, UK.
© 2007 Swansea University DOI: 10.1179/174581507x209597
 212 Akane Kawakami
in competition. Precedence is clearly given to the written word in first editions of most
literary autobiographies: it is only when they are reissued as cheaper, ‘livre de poche’
editions that they sometimes surreptitiously acquire a selection of images.5
But of course writing and photography have not always been set against each other.
Many writers welcomed the new medium, discussing it in or incorporating it into their
texts. More recently, some have crossed the battle lines between the two media by becom-
ing photographers whilst remaining writers. Hervé Guibert, Gérard Macé, and W. G.
Sebald, amongst others, are instances of these late twentieth-century, early twenty-first
century ‘writer/photographers’ whose works transcend the traditional dichotomy. Guibert
experimented with various combinations of photograph and text, as I will discuss below;
Gérard Macé has published several collections of his own photographs, and in Un Monde qui
ressemble au monde, he threads his own photographs of Kyoto’s gardens into a traveller’s
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

essay; W. G. Sebald inserted his amateur shots, purposely grainy and poorly produced as if
to emphasize their function of proof rather than illustration, into the texts of works such as
The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. As well as being a new, hybrid genre,
these works have the virtue of demonstrating, though they are not the first to do so, that
the classic opposition between autobiographical writing and photographs of/by the author is
a false one. It is not only a self-portrait that will portray the photographer: any photograph
by him, like any piece of writing by a novelist, will capture something of his self.6 An
author does not have to write an autobiography to reveal himself to his readers, and a
photograph’s subject is, on a certain level, always the photographer.
This article will explore the ways in which the photographic act is an autobiographical
one, and show how Guibert uses photographs of the other — his friends, lovers and family
— to represent his self. Such self-portrayals through the other will often involve degrees of
exploitation of the other, writings of the other into the self’s story, which I will redescribe
here as different forms of love. I hope to show how the photographic act can establish
a variety of relationships between the photographing self and the photographed other,
ranging from pure exploitation to selfless tenderness, or give rise to uneasy mixtures of,
for instance, sexual and filial love. But first I want to sketch in a historical and thematic
background for my study of Guibert by looking at two of his ‘precursors’ in this field. Both
Proust and Barthes wrote knowledgeably and personally, so to speak, about photographs:
both explored how the autobiographical impulse relates to love in the context of photo-
graphy.7 The centrality of these two figures to Guibert’s work, as well as to debates about
photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, makes them ideal — as well as
obligatory — points of reference for this study.8 Given, however, that there is no space
here to give an overview, much less an exhaustive account of their theories, I will limit
myself to discussing an affective node which acts as a point of entry for all three writers into
the tissue of concerns described above, penetrating both the theoretical and emotional
layers of their thinking: the mother.9 What follows is a brief study of how photographing
the (grand)mother is related to autobiographical concerns in Proust and Barthes.10
Proust had a reputation as a benevolent photomane, wont to pester his friends for photo-
graphs of themselves and to bore new acquaintances with his vast collection.11 This appar-
ently superficial obsession has for many masked the photograph’s importance to his creative
imagination. Photography is present in the narrative techniques, key scenes, and metaphors
of A la recherche du temps perdu: one critic has even spoken of ‘la place prépondérante
prise par la photographie dans sa vie et dans son œuvre’.12 Proust was no Luddite: on the
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 213
contrary, he was fascinated by the effect of mechanical devices on human ways of seeing
the world.13 But the camera was a special favourite, and it has been argued that it is respon-
sible for some of the most innovative narrative devices and themes to be found in the
novel.14
The narrator’s grandmother is photographed on several occasions. One of the earliest
instances occurs in the first part of Le Côté de Guermantes, where the narrator experiences a
moment of ‘photographic’ vision when he sees his grandmother after a period of absence.
Returning from his travels, the Narrator enters the salon where his grandmother is reading,
unnoticed by her:

Hélas, ce fantôme-là, ce fut lui que j’aperçus quand, entré au salon sans que ma grand-mère fût
avertie de mon retour, je la trouvai en train de lire. J’étais là, ou plutôt je n’étais pas encore là
puisqu’elle ne le savait pas, et [...] elle était livrée à des pensées qu’elle n’avait jamais montrées
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

devant moi. De moi [...] il n’y avait là que le témoin, l’observateur, [...] le photographe qui
vient prendre un cliché des lieux qu’on ne reverra plus. Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce
moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand-mère, ce fut bien une photographie.

In this moment when he is still ‘not there’, when he is not present as a loving viewer but
only as a camera-like, passive set of eyes (‘ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes
yeux’), the Narrator sees his grandmother for the first time as she is in reality. Usually we
do not see our loved ones in this way, because our love and tenderness blur our vision.
Occasionally, however,

[nos regards] fonctionnent mécaniquement à la façon de pellicules, et nous montrent, au lieu de

l’être aimé qui n’existe plus depuis longtemps mais dont elle [notre tendresse] n’avait jamais voulu
que la mort nous fût révélée, l’être nouveau que cent fois par jour elle revêtait d’une chère et
menteuse ressemblance.15

Proust makes it clear that to see a loved one ‘photographically’ is to see her in the context
of her impending death. ‘As a mechanical and chemical process, photography acts as the
embalming of reflections past [...] photographic images are effigies’, even when they
represent people who are still alive.16 (Indeed, at times photography can set off and acceler-
ate the ageing process, as we will see later in the case of Guibert.) Habitually, our love for
the person superimposes a younger image onto the ageing face, and it is only when we are
given — in spite of ourselves — a moment of photographic vision that we are forced to
contemplate the person’s mortality.
However traumatic its effect may be, photographic vision is also a way of seeing which
makes it possible for us to see a loved person as an other:

Moi pour qui ma grand-mère c’était encore moi-même, moi qui ne l’avais jamais vue que dans
mon âme, toujours à la même place du passé, à travers la transparence des souvenirs contigus et
superposés, tout d’un coup, dans notre salon qui faisait partie d’un monde nouveau, celui du
Temps, celui où vivent les étrangers dont on dit “il vieillit bien”, pour la première fois et
seulement pour un instant car elle disparut bien vite, j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge,
lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-dessus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une
vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas.17

The grandmother has always been a part of the Narrator, until the moment when photo-
graphic vision places her in the ‘monde [...] du Temps’, and shows her to him as an ageing
 214 Akane Kawakami
woman. It may seem paradoxical that photographic vision should do this, because we usu-
ally think of photographs not as putting things back into, but taking them out of time,
capturing a moment and making it eternal.18 But Proust here shows how it is the Narrator’s
affective imagination that fixes a false image of his grandmother in his mind’s eye: an
idealized, sentimentalized grandmother, hitherto seen always ‘à travers la transparence des
souvenirs contigus et superposés’ and therefore as part of his autobiography, rather than of
hers. Because he has only every seen her ‘dans mon âme’, he has never had to love her as
flesh separate from his.
This collection of emotional associations that has, hitherto, prevented the Narrator from
seeing his grandmother as she is may be described as an aura. Walter Benjamin defined aura
first as ‘associations or clusters of images gathered about an object of reverence’, then as ‘an
atmosphere, or nimbus, obscuring an object’.19 In other words, an aura is something that
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

impedes clear-sighted vision: it is the effect of the viewer’s emotional investment in a loved
face or object. This viewer can be the photographer himself, as in the case of Guibert’s
photographs, or simply the person who has been granted photographic vision, as is the case
for Proust’s Narrator. So aura, an effect of love, falsifies vision, but this does not mean that
photographic vision requires the viewer to suppress his emotions: only that he be mature.
The Narrator’s love, which had kept his grandmother fixed ‘toujours à la même place du
passé’, is an immature, self-centred emotion. To love her truly for what she is, he must
learn to love her unselfishly, to release her from his inevitably autobiographical imagination.
Thus photographic vision plays a crucial part in the development of the Narrator into a
novelist: it transports the Narrator into the realm of Time, which is the realm of narrative,
and so of the novel. Photography teaches him, through the difficult lesson of his
grandmother’s mortality, to write about a self existing through time.
Barthes’s La Chambre claire20 may have been inspired by the death of his mother, but the
other, more literary, presence in the book is Proust. As well as the many references to
Proust’s novel footnoted in the margins, and the vaguer echoes which are simply and
familiarly acknowledged as ‘proustien’, the argument, according to one critic, ‘emboîte
fidèlement le pas de l’analyse proustienne’.21 Perhaps this is a function of the kinship that
Barthes, in mourning for his mother, feels afresh for Proust, because Proust, too, is mourn-
ing his mother, albeit in self-contained sections ranging over a much more extensive text.
Barthes’s mourning is based on, or rather clings to, a characteristic of photography that he
had already isolated as its most important one in works such as Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes and L’Empire des signes. This is photography’s special relationship with reality, its
immediately and irrefutably referential nature: ‘dans la Photographie, je ne puis jamais
nier que la chose a été là.’ This, for Barthes, is the first principle of photography, ‘le noème
“Ça-a-été”’.22 It is responsible, in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, for the self’s strange
experience of otherness when he sees a photograph of himself:

Mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à cela! — Comment le savez-vous? Qu’est-ce que ce “vous” auquel
vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas? [...] Où est votre corps de vérité?23

A photograph of oneself, as Barthes explains, is the ultimate paradox in that, although it is

so often ‘unrecognisable’ to the subject, it must, because of the referential prerogative,
be ‘real’. This ‘noème’ of the photograph, which Barthes never questions, in spite of his
awareness that trick photography, for instance, exists, is central to his arguments in La
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 215
Chambre claire. It is a potential weakness in his argument, and one that Guibert will go on
ruthlessly to exploit in his own collection of essays on photography, as we will see.
Barthes starts this work by reminding us of this ‘othering’ effect of photography on the
self — ‘c’est “moi” qui ne coïncide jamais avec mon image’ — but then he offers (in
parentheses, as is so often the case with his most important or heartfelt statements) a
surprising antidote to this photographic loss of the self:

Hélàs, je suis condamné par la Photographie, [...] à avoir toujours une mine: mon corps ne
trouve jamais son degré zéro, personne ne le lui donne (peut-être seule ma mère? Car ce n’est
pas l’indifférence qui enlève le poids de l’image [...], c’est l’amour, l’amour extrême). (CC,
p. 27)

This wondering, this aside entre parenthèses, is not explained, elaborated upon or given any
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

objective status. It is just a hunch on Barthes’s part, occurring very early on in the narrative
and well before he has found the picture of his mother as a child in the Jardin d’Hiver,24
that she will be instrumental to his search for his self — or the self — in photography. Once
he has found the photograph, one evening not long after her death, he becomes convinced
that this photograph of his mother will provide him with the key to a theory:

Quelque chose comme une essence de la Photographie flottait dans cette photo particulière. Je
décidai alors de ‘sortir’ toute la Photographie (sa ‘nature’) de la seule photo qui existât assurément
pour moi, et de la prendre en quelque sorte pour guide de ma dernière recherche. (CC, p. 114)

Any photo of his mother will prove, on a basic level, her existence, or rather the fact that
she existed. The problem is that most photos do not seem to look like her, to have
captured the uniqueness of her being. This is why Barthes is so struck by the Jardin d’Hiver
photo, which — he claims — has fixed his mother’s essence, her ‘true’ self, what he dubs
her ‘air’. ‘L’air (j’appelle ainsi, faute de mieux, l’expression de vérité) est comme le
supplément intraitable de l’identité’, and only occurs in the odd photo, but when it does,
it captures the real person: ‘sur cette photo de vérité, l’être que j’aime, que j’ai aimé, n’est
pas séparé de lui-même: enfin il coïncide’. In this photo of his mother, ‘je fais bien plus
que la reconnaître [...] je la retrouve: éveil brusque, hors de la “ressemblance”, satori où les
mots défaillent’ (CC, p. 168). The reference to satori, harking back to L’Empire des signes,
confirms that this is an instance of the ‘real’ erupting into our world of signs and resem-
blances:25 a photo that has caught a person’s ‘air’ affords us a rare moment of access to the
referent, even if it is a past referent. And the verb ‘coïncider’ (‘enfin il coïncide’) echoes
his complaint, earlier in the book, that he himself never seems to coincide with his own
photographic images (‘c’est “moi” qui ne coïncide jamais avec mon image’).
What was suggested then — that his mother would, somehow, give him back the ‘degré
zéro’ of his body — hints at a way in which the Jardin d’Hiver photograph can save him,
although it is not made explicit. Discussing what it means to say that a photo is
‘ressemblante’, Barthes points out that an original identity is often ‘imprécise, imaginaire
même,’ especially when it is of himself: ‘moi qui me sens un sujet incertain, amythique,
comment pourrais-je me trouver ressemblant? Je ne ressemble qu’à d’autres photos de moi,
et cela à l’infini: personne n’est jamais que la copie d’une copie, réelle ou mentale’ (CC,
p. 159). But Barthes can now be freed from this Baudrillardian hell, thanks to his mother,
as indeed he had foreseen. The Jardin d’Hiver photo, because it has both touched (through
 216 Akane Kawakami
chemistry and light) and captured the real person of his mother,26 breaks the vicious circle
of self-reflecting images and returns him to himself. Because he has photographic proof of
her existence and essence, and because she is literally his ‘origin’, his own self is guaranteed.
The Jardin d’Hiver photo functions as both the originary image and reality. It is also the
origin of Barthes’s text, in which, however, it is not included: ‘Je ne puis montrer la Photo
du Jardin d’Hiver. Elle n’existe que pour moi. Pour vous, elle ne serait rien d’autre qu’une
photo indifférente, [...] elle ne peut fonder une objectivité, au sens positif du terme’27 (CC,
p. 115).
Thus the origin of Barthes’s text is a photograph of his mother that we are not privileged
to see.28 The origin of Hervé Guibert’s L’Image fantôme, a collection of essays on the subject
of photography published the year after La Chambre claire, is a photograph of Guibert’s
mother that was taken but does not exist. This is one of the many acts of homage, reaction,
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

and competition that link Guibert’s book to Barthes’s. Guibert reviewed La Chambre
claire for Le Monde, although by the time the review was published Barthes was in hospital,
having been hit by a lorry in front of the Collège de France. He died about two months
after his accident, but Guibert’s discussion with his friend and mentor on the subject of
photography was to continue, in increasingly combative language, in the essays of L’Image
fantôme. ‘La retoucheuse’, for instance, attacks Barthes’s thesis of the referential nature of
photography by expanding on the subject of the retouch artist. And ‘L’image fantôme’, the
tale of how Guibert takes a photograph of his mother, is very much a continuation of —
as well as an attempt to outdo — Barthes’s mourning of his mother in La Chambre claire.29
For the greatest difference between Guibert and his predecessors, in the context of this
essay, is the fact that he was himself a talented photographer. He published several works
containing his own photographs: Suzanne et Louise (1980) is a ‘roman-photo’ made up of
photographs of his two great-aunts and a handwritten ‘story’; Vice (1991) is a gallery of
photographs inserted into a collection of short texts; Le seul visage (1984), his only ‘album’,
is a collection of fifty-five photographs with a short preface.30 L’Image fantôme, by contrast,
contains no photographs. Many of Guibert’s works bear self-portraits on their covers,31 a
fitting tribute to a man whose classic good looks fascinated many, and who was himself
obsessed by bodies — his own, in particular, after he became an AIDS sufferer — through-
out his life.32 His almost clinical interest in his own condition culminated in his video, La
Pudeur ou l’impudeur, ‘in which he filmed himself going about his daily life while the sound
track is made up mostly of excerpts of his diary read by him’.33 He continued to work on
this apotheosis of self-portrayal until just months before his death on 27 December 1991, at
thirty-six years of age.
It is generally accepted that Guibert’s whole œuvre is intensely autobiographical, whether
it is the writing, the films and videos, or the photography: in all of these media he was
attempting to capture his self, both in explicitly autobiographical modes and some that were
less obviously so.34 Indeed although many of the photographs and texts are self-portraits,
those that are not seem equally autobiographical. In photography, as in writing, Guibert
believes that it is the photographer, not the photographed, who leaves his trace in the
photograph, through the choice of angles, lighting and arrangement of the subject. Guibert
took many photographs in his lifetime, but he was also much photographed, and nowhere
more consistently so than in a book of photographs by Hans-Georg Berger, consisting
entirely of portraits of Guibert.35 In its preface Guibert describes — from the subject’s point
of view — how the act of photographing takes the photographed subject out of his story
and puts him into that of the photographer:
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 217
Rarement le sujet se retrouve dans sa propre histoire: il en est sorti de force par l’empreinte du
photographe, ce déterminisme du cadre qui l’efface un peu comme individu.36

The image of photography as a violent, ‘taking’ act is not new — as Susan Sontag puts it
succinctly, ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’.37 Guibert returns to
this image frequently in his essays on photography, describing how the photographer can
take possession of his object for his own purposes: ‘en prenant ta photo je te lie à moi si je
veux, [...] je t’assimile un peu, et tu n’y peux rien.’38 But as the ‘un peu’ suggests by illogi-
cally softening the action of assimilating the other (it is not possible to assimilate someone
‘a little’), Guibert also claims that photography is an act of love: a possessive love perhaps,
but love rather than rape. In the preface to Le seul visage, a collection of fifty-five photo-
graphs by Guibert of his friends, parents and a number of landscapes,39 he describes the
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

genesis of the photograph after which the collection is named. It was taken when he was in
Yugoslavia, standing with Cartier-Bresson in an auditorium full of people. Guibert watches
as Cartier-Bresson takes a photograph, then looks at the people he has just photographed
with an expression that Guibert reads as a definitive ‘mise à mort’. Guibert contrasts this
with his own attitude towards photographing someone: for him, it is an act of love.
Suddenly a face in the same crowd captures his attention:

Instantanément j’aimais follement ce visage. C’était pour moi un instant proprement

photographique: programmé par le hasard et la configuration de l’espace, un coup de foudre
photographique.40

So to photograph is to fall in love: but what kind of love is this? Is it, as was suggested in
his preface to Berger’s book, a possessive love that takes the photographed person out of
his story and puts him into that of the photographer? Given that this declaration comes
in the preface to a book containing a number of photographs of his friends, the question
is a potentially worrying one. To think of a collection of portraits as a form of self-
representation is in fact nothing new.41 (Proust’s collection of photographs of his friends
almost certainly served this function: that would explain why he was always so keen to
show his collection to new acquaintances.) Guibert’s own gallery might be described as a
testament to his friends’ feelings for him, proof of their affection as they agreed to pose for
him (in the book they are identified by their first names only, as if to emphasize their close-
ness to Guibert): this circle of friends thus creates his identity.42 But are the friendships
being exploited? Guibert’s preface exhibits an uneasy mixture of motives: a desire to possess
his subjects attenuated by thoughts about love and friendship. The ambivalence comes out
in the following comment:

Tout mon attachement au visage passait par la photo, car la photo était aussi un moyen de m’en
approcher (comme le lion, j’imagine, en cercles concentriques autour de sa proie).43

Guibert’s photographic way of seeing this face is his way of getting closer to it (‘un moyen
de m’en approcher’), which appears indicative of a respectful attitude towards his subject.
But we are then suddenly presented with the image of a lion circling his prey: into paren-
theses, like an inadmissible desire, Guibert releases the beast whose intentions towards his
prey are anything but pure. (Eating is, of course, a very thorough way of assimilating an
other: ‘je t’assimile un peu, et tu n’y peux rien.’) The preface ensures that, when the reader
 218 Akane Kawakami
looks through the photographs in Le seul visage, she is constantly asking herself
whether Guibert’s friends are being assimilated or loved by the photographer; whether each
photograph is privileging the photographer’s story or that of its subject.
The range of emotions accompanying Guibert’s photographic act can be seen in ‘Isabelle’
from Le seul visage. The subject of this photograph is not immediately recognizable: it might
take even an ardent fan several seconds to look at the face, match it to the first-name
caption, ‘Isabelle’, and come to the realization that it is Isabelle Adjani. This was not taken
when the actress was as anonymous as the photograph suggests. The photograph is not
dated, but even giving it the earliest possible date of 1977 puts it after the releases of
Truffaut’s Adèle H (1975), a Polanski film, and a Hollywood film (The Driver). In other
words, the actress was already an international film star at the time the photo was taken.
Her image would already have been part of the public consciousness, which means that any
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

photo of her must be considered within the context of her celebrity.44

In this context, Guibert’s photograph is iconoclastic on several fronts. Adjani’s position
creates an immediate impression of intimacy, insofar as the photo is a close-up of her lying
horizontally, with her face turned towards the camera. But this is an intimacy that is com-
pletely non-sexual. Her clothes do not mould her body: on the contrary, they sheathe it in
a collection of straight lines that obscure her curves completely. The overall effect, which
is forbiddingly angular, is completed by the positioning of her hand on her womb area, as
if to emphasize her sexual unavailability. Her face, with its delicate features, cannot be
angular, but it lies, expressionless, next to the protected body. In other words, the photo-
graph is the very opposite of a publicity shot for an actress: no sex, no emotion, a refusal
to ‘sell’ her image to her fans and viewers.
One way to interpret this photograph would be to call it protective: the photographer,
who loves Adjani with a disinterested love, wants to protect her from the covetous gaze of
her public. In that sense we might call this a photo taken ‘for’ her: a photo which attempts
to take her out of the sexualized public narrative that she inhabits professionally and put her
back into her private story, a story in which the photographer — Guibert — is her personal
friend (as indeed he was). But protective love can also be possessive and suffocating. It
might be argued that here Guibert’s desire to protect Adjani crushes her feminine form and
obscures her beauty, which is an intrinsic part of her identity, whether or not she is in the
public gaze. And, in so doing, he kills something so integral to her that the famously
expressive face seems devoid of life. Indeed the position of her body suggests that she is
dead: the hard surface on which she is lying is reminiscent of a tomb or a coffin lid, even
an autopsy table.45 If we read the photograph thus, it is possible to argue that Guibert’s
photographic act of love has turned into an autobiographical act of possession: writing her
out of the public domain and into his own story, the photographer has removed her from
her own story, which — given that she is Isabelle Adjani, actress — must of necessity be
both private and inescapably public.46
It is interesting to contrast the ambivalence of this photograph with a more obviously
exploitative portrait of Adjani by Guibert in an article entitled ‘Adjani, ou la vertu de
l’excès’ published in Le Monde at the time of the twenty-fourth Cannes Festival.47 Guibert,
attempting to discover the secret of Adjani’s attraction, focuses on her skin,

d’une pâleur et d’une matité d’un autre siècle: une blancheur qui n’est pas poudreuse ni
cadavérique mais qui tient de la porcelaine, de la lactescence, et où affleurent si facilement les
bouffées roses du trouble [...] Mais surtout, quel magnifique écran, quelle magnifique matière
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 219
pour recevoir et rejeter la passion, pour la modeler, en vagues puissantes ou en frémissements,
quel voile pour nouer les sentiments plus secrets, les flottements hagards, les dérives actives, les
attirances fatales, les gouffres, de violents désirs de mort.

Guibert, in describing Adjani’s skin as a ‘magnifique écran’, is clearly thinking of it as a

metaphor for the cinema screen, a human screen onto which the cinema can project its
stories, whereas ‘[une] magnifique matière pour recevoir et rejeter la passion’ is perhaps a
reference to camera film. Guibert does not spell out either of these metaphors, but goes on
to tell us that he ‘uses’ her image as a template for his favourite literary heroines:

J’ai décidé qu’elle serait mon modèle d’identification féminine, et, chaque fois, elle apparaît entre
les lignes, elle donne corps, successivement, à Charlotte, à Nastassia Philipovna, à Salammbô, et
elle ne déçoit jamais l’écriture.48
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

She is a vessel which he can fill with his imagination: he can write her into his private
readings of Goethe, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. In contrast with his photograph of her, this
written portrait is much more exploitative. Or rather, it makes unashamed use of her as an
actress: actors and actresses ‘incarnate’ for a living, so it is arguably permissible to use them
as a template for one’s fantasies.49 This only becomes a morally problematic issue when the
actor or actress is personally known to you, as Adjani was to Guibert, but in this article
Guibert is careful to remain within his role as a critic, refraining from making any com-
ments that would betray their personal closeness. On the other hand, the photograph,
as discussed above, makes no secret of the photographer’s intimate relationship with the
subject. It is also the case that in a photograph, it is never possible to compartmentalize an
identity in the way that Guibert’s text discusses Adjani the actress rather than Adjani the
personal friend. In a photograph the ambiguity — is she an actress or a private individual?
— must remain, because the actual body, the physical presence, cannot be elided. So
photography, as a medium, leaves more room for ambiguous intentions to circulate. Adjani,
who has always been famously difficult about her photographs, must have been aware about
the transgressive potential of this medium:50 so, conversely, Guibert’s photograph of her
attests to the quality of their friendship, her trust in his re-creation of her in his image.
This trust is put to the test in an essay in L’Image fantôme called, tellingly, ‘La Trahison’.
It picks up on many of the familiar aspects of his relationship with Adjani: it tells the story
of their first meeting, her obsession with her photographs, and his desire, visible in the
photograph analysed above, to ‘rescue’ her from her public image. Guibert describes how,
at a certain point in her career, the actress takes a professional decision to be photographed
only when she is fully made up, and how this ‘banalizes’ her beauty:

Le maquillage ne l’enlaidissait pas, mais il la banalisait totalement: il ne restait plus qu’une image
plate et froide que je maudissais chaque fois que j’y étais confronté, dans un magazine ou sur une
affichette de kiosque. [...] Plusieurs fois nous avions parlé de faire des photos ensemble, et la rage
provoquée par la dernière couverture de ce magazine de mode, me semble-t-il, me pressa de les
faire: je lui dis que je voulais la photographier sans maquillage, avec une robe noire très simple.
(IF, p. 130)

The photo session takes place in the Jardin des Plantes, and despite a mechanical mishap,51
the photographs are good, and Adjani likes them. Several days later, the day before
his departure for Venice, Guibert wakes up to a sudden ‘certitude’: he must sell these
 220 Akane Kawakami
photographs to a popular magazine. He arranges the sale, goes off to Venice and calls Adjani
to tell her what he has done: he then changes his mind and rushes back to Paris, gets the
photographs back from the magazine and calls Adjani again, who reacts with generosity and
kindness. The essay concludes with an attempt to explain his actions: ‘pour me venger de
l’image de I. que je n’aimais pas, j’avais voulu lui substituer, de force, l’image d’elle qui
m’était chère, mon image d’elle, une sorte de putsch, en somme. Mais cette explication
n’était pas suffisante: je devais me tenir sur mes gardes ...’ (IF, p. 134).
These three portraits of Adjani by Guibert — the photograph, the descriptive piece, and
the story of photography as betrayal — all form part of the story of Guibert’s obsession with
capturing Adjani’s image,52 a task complicated by her double identity as a public star and a
private friend.53 It is also the story of Guibert’s relationship with photography: his need to
photograph a loved one (IF, p. 96) and the result, which is always betrayal. The betrayal
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

may simply manifest itself as disappointment on the part of the photographer (when he first
sees his contact prints, ‘le premier mouvement, le premier réflexe, c’est la déception: “ainsi
je n’ai vu que ça”’) (IF, p. 78). There is also a betrayal implicit, when he takes photos of
his friends, in putting the subjects on show.54 But the fundamental betrayal is the fact that
a photograph both preserves and kills its subject. Even if the model is pleased with the
photograph, even if the photograph seems to do what it set out to do (in the last case, to
produce an anti-public image of Adjani), the photograph betrays its subject by taking her
out of time: by freezing, albeit momentarily, her temporal existence. Perhaps the explana-
tion for Guibert’s strange actions described in ‘La Trahison’ is that it was a violent reaction
to this the double-edged gift of photography: he got what he wanted, an image of a loved
one, but in so doing he killed her by taking her out of time, the only medium in which
human beings exist.55
In another essay in L’Image fantôme, Guibert photographs an even more fundamental love
of his life.56 ‘La photographie est aussi une pratique très amoureuse’ (IF, p. 11), begins the
essay that gives the collection its title, and in which Guibert describes how, at the age of
eighteen, he decided to take a perfect photograph of his mother.57 He describes how he
meticulously prepared his mother for the session, removing all aspects of her that had been
imposed by his father (her hairstyle, her lack of make-up), as well as the man himself: ‘la
première chose que je fis fut d’évacuer mon père du théâtre où la photo allait se produire,
de le chasser pour que son regard à elle ne passe plus par le sien [...] qu’il n’y ait plus que
notre connivence à nous, une connivence nouvelle, débarrassée du mari et du père’ (IF,
p. 12). The Oedipal situation is emphasized by the fact that Guibert is eighteen (he has
come of age), and by the fact that he projects his homoerotic desire onto his mother by
getting her to put on a hat which reminds him of Tadzio in the Visconti film Death in
Venice (IF, p. 12).58 He arranges the furniture and the lighting, gets his mother to relax her
features as she has never done before, and then takes the photos:

Elle était là, assise, majestueuse, comme une reine avant une exécution capitale (je me demande
maintenant si ce n’est pas sa propre exécution qu’elle attendait, car, une fois la photo prise,
l’image fixée, le processus du vieillissement pouvait bien reprendre, et cette fois à une vitesse
vertigineuse; [...]) Je la pris en photo: elle était à ce moment-là au summum de sa beauté, le
visage totalement détendu et lisse, elle ne parlait pas, je tournais autour d’elle, elle avait sur les
lèvres un sourire imperceptible, indéfinissable, de paix, de bonheur, comme si la lumière la
baignait, comme si ce tourbillon lent autour d’elle, à distance, était la plus douce de caresses. Je
pense qu’à ce moment elle jouissait de cette image d’elle-même que moi son fils je lui permettais
d’obtenir, et que je capturais à l’insu de mon père.59 (IF, p. 14)
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 221
Guibert’s circling of his mother (‘je tournais autour d’elle [...] ce tourbillon lent autour
d’elle’) is an echo of the lion stalking his prey in Le seul visage, with its disturbing conno-
tations, but it also has the effect of underlining the mobility of the scene, as does the
repeated use of the imperfect, and the temporal indexical (‘je pense qu’à ce moment elle
jouissait de cette image d’elle-même’). This mobility is in contrast with the fixedness of the
photograph: the photograph which, tragically, does not materialize in the end because of a
mechanical error. Thereafter, as Guibert predicted, his mother ages swiftly, a fairy-tale
punishment for colluding with her son’s attempt to take a perfect photograph of her. All
that remains of the day is the text, and a ghostly image:

Donc ce texte n’aura pas d’illustration, qu’une amorce de pellicule vierge. Et le texte n’aurait pas
été si l’image avait été prise. L’image serait là devant moi, probablement encadrée, parfaite et
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

fausse, irréelle, plus encore qu’une photo de jeunesse: la preuve, le délit d’une pratique presque
diabolique. Plus qu’un tour de passe-passe ou de prestidigitation: une machine à arrêter le temps.
Car ce texte est le désepoir de l’image, et pire qu’une image floue ou voilée: une image fantôme
... (IF, p. 18)

These are the final sentences of the essay, situated firmly in the present of the writing (‘ce
texte [the essay] n’aura pas d’illustration’), in which Guibert seems retrospectively to suggest
that it is a good thing that the photo was never taken. It would have been a fine photo-
graph (‘probablement encadrée’, he notes sneeringly) but ‘parfaite et fausse, irréelle’.
Guibert does not tell us why he is glad there is no material record of this time in his
mother’s life, other than that he thinks it would have been ‘la preuve, le délit d’une
pratique presque diabolique. Plus qu’un tour de passe-passe ou de prestidigitation: une
machine à arrêter le temps’. It is unclear why the camera’s ability to take something out of
time and to make it eternal, never seen as a disadvantage in his other essays, is a problem
here, especially immediately afterwards, as he seems to contradict his feeling that it was a
good thing the photograph did not come out by describing the text as being ‘le désespoir de
l’image’, of the ‘image fantôme’ that was never taken. The ambivalence is indicative of an
excess of emotion surrounding this event, clearly a consequence of the special subject of
this photograph, his mother. If it had not disappeared, such a photograph would have
attested to the youth and beauty of his mother, and therefore to its loss: it would have been
proof of an insanely happy moment of collusion between mother and son, and of its loss.60
This is perhaps why the magic of photography becomes an evil in this specific case, because
it would have fixed a moment in time only to be proof of its irredeemable disappearance.
The ageing of mothers, heralding their death, is a reality that cannot be borne.
The emotional weight of this event would have ensured that the photograph, had it
materialized, would have been full of aura. Benjamin, when defining aura, specified that
photographs could not possess auras: but it has been argued by many critics since that
photography, especially since its evolution into an art form, is as able to command aura as
painting, sculpture, or charismatic personages. A talented photographer like Guibert is able
to create an aura around his subject through his choice of lighting, angles, positions, and so
on. In his photograph of Adjani, Guibert attempted to replace the ‘public’ aura surrounding
the actress with his own vision of her. In the photograph of his mother in L’Image fantôme,
Guibert is attempting to surround her with his own emotional associations, to photograph
her from his, the son’s, point of view. The resulting aura is what makes her uniquely
 222 Akane Kawakami
beautiful to her son through the lens. The ‘falsity’ — or, to put it more gently, the non-
objective nature — of aura is perhaps another reason why Guibert says that the photograph,
had it materialized, would have been ‘fausse, irréelle’.
But it is not the case that aura is ‘wrong’ in some moral sense: Proust’s Narrator used
photographic vision to cut through it, but also described it as tenderness and intelligence.
Aura may not be an objective reality, but it exists wherever emotion exists. Although there
is no photograph to commemorate that day in Guibert’s life, the photographic act, ‘une
pratique très amoureuese’, did take place: on that day, he saw a new image of his mother
through his lens. And this ‘image fantôme’, at least, is lodged in his memory and inspired
his text. Indeed, in many of the essays in L’Image fantôme, it is most often the non-existent
photographs — untaken, failed, or lost — that inspire writing.61 The narrative of L’Image
fantôme becomes, slowly, ‘un négatif de photographie’:
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

Il [le récit] parle de la photo de façon négative, il ne parle que d’images fantômes, d’images qui
ne sont pas sorties, ou bien d’images latentes, d’images intimes au point d’en être invisibles.
Il devient aussi comme une tentative de biographie par la photographie: chaque histoire
individuelle se double de son histoire photographique, imagée, imaginée. (IF, p. 124)

It is in this way that Guibert’s writings on photography in L’Image fantôme constitute an

autobiography, as he writes lovingly about the photos he remembers, the ones that did not
materialize. Photography is the source of stories about the self, even when the photos do
not exist. It also triggers stories about those most dear to the self, stories which may be used
painfully to distinguish the self from a too-beloved other. A mother’s photograph, imagined
or real, must constitute proof of the self’s origin: this is why it provides autobiographical
impetus for both Proust and Barthes. Similarly, Guibert’s unsuccessful photo of his mother
is at the origin of his autobiographical essays. This desire to photograph the mother may
also underlie his obsessive attempts to portray Adjani. It could be said that, in his attempts
to capture Adjani as the ‘éternel féminin’, Guibert was in fact seeking a desexualized,
maternal ideal. His intimate, protective yet asexual portrait of her in Le seul visage might
then be seen as an ‘éternel maternel’, so to speak; not a woman to be protected from the
sexualizing gaze of her audience, but a mother free of any father, and thus permanently
idealized in the eyes of a homosexual son. Certainly, through his photographs and whatever
their subject, Guibert charted the area of love between possession and freedom, as if to map
the spaces of his heart. The photographic act can be a way of writing the other into the
self’s autobiography, to various degrees of love and exploitation: the resulting photograph
freezes a moment in time, thereby immortalizing and killing the subject, but photographic
vision, which puts the subject back into time, is its antidote.

1 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 120.

2 Much has been written about the relationship between photography and reality, especially in discussions
of La Chambre claire, and around the subject of reference and representation as alternative functions of
this medium. For a summary and analysis of the issues see, for instance, Ann Jefferson, ‘Roland Barthes:
Photography and the Other of Writing’, The Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, i (1992), 293–307.
3 This is not, of course, to say that photographs can, on their own, make up an autobiography, as they can
only represent fragments of a life: ‘La photographie ne peut à elle seule constituer un pacte
autobiographique. C’est le texte, après coup, qui lui donne cette dimension.’ Gabriel Bauret,
‘Autobiographie littéraire et autobiographie photographique’, Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 13 (1984), 13.
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 223
4 So autobiography, once held up against the novel as a genre that attempted to capture the true person
of the author, is now seen to be as fictional, in its own way, as fiction: literary critics have shown how
autobiography is always a creation, rather than a record, of the self. And the ‘simple’ view of photography
as a mere reflection of reality has been refuted by theorists of photography who have shown how the
photographer’s vision, her choice of subject, setting, lighting and angle, fashions the photograph into a
work of art. See, for instance, Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography, Devices and Desires: from Leiris to
Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Mary Price, The Photograph: a Strange, Confined Place (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1994) for discussions of this subject in autobiography and photography,
respectively.
5 On this unspoken hierarchy, see Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, L’Autobiographie (Paris:
Armand Colin, 1997), p. 255. With regard to the later addition of photographs, Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt
is a case in point: the ‘livre de poche’ edition boasts four photographs on the front and back covers,
arranged in such a way as to tell the story, ‘in pictures’, of Gide’s life.
6 I will, in the main, be using the male personal pronoun to refer to the photographer and the writer in
the remainder of the article, as Guibert, Barthes and/or Proust will be the implicit figures under discussion.
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

7 There are numerous studies of Barthes’s views on photography: see n. 20 for a small selection. Fewer
scholars have written about Proust and photography, but see for instance Brassaï, Marcel Proust sous l’emprise
de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Jean Cléder and Jean-Pierre Montier (eds), Proust et les images:
peinture, photographie, cinéma, vidéo (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003); Stephen C. Infantino,
Photographic Vision in Proust (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).
8 See, for instance, Ralph Sarkonak, Angelic Echoes: Hervé Guibert and Company (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 156 and 170, for a few examples of Proustian autobiographical echoes in Guibert,
or pp. 131–33 for a discussion, in Guibert’s Fou de Vincent, of Vincent’s similarity to Albertine. The
relationship between Barthes and Guibert is discussed below (see n. 30).
9 Erin C. Mitchell’s ‘Writing Photography: The Grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past, the Mother
in Camera Lucida, and Especially, the Mother in The Lover’, in Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, 24.2
(Summer 2000), confirms the links between Proust and Barthes on this specific issue. Her views on these
two authors, however, as well as her axiomatic statements about photography, are diametrically opposed to
mine; see, for instance, pp. 325 and 333.
10 It is generally accepted that the character of the grandmother in Proust’s novel owes much to that of his
mother in real life. See, for instance, William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), p. 35.
11 Roger Grenier, in preface to Brassaï, p. 11.
12 Brassaï, p. 17.
13 See Infantino, ch. 1.
14 ‘“Mémoire involontaire” et “image latente” sont des phénomènes étroitement liés dans son esprit’;
Brassaï, p. 19.
15 Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes (Paris: Gallimard, 1920–21), pp. 171–72, my italics.
16 Infantino, pp. 29–30. The link between photography and death is a staple of photography theory,
especially since the publication of La Chambre claire. Less well known, perhaps, is the historical relationship
between photography and embalming: ‘L’Utilisation de la photographie comme “souvenir” s’accompagna
de la résurgence d’une pratique contradictoire avec la volonté de reviviscence, celle de l’embaumement.’
Jean-Pierre Montier, ‘La Photographie “...dans le temps”: de Proust à Barthes et réciproquement’, in
Cléder and Montier, pp. 69–114 (p. 70).
17 Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes, p. 172.
18 This is a standard view about photography, related to its relationship with death (see n. 16). See for
instance Mitchell: ‘The process of photography and the photograph itself enframe, capture, and immobilize
a human subject [...] Photography immortalizes a moment’ (pp. 329–30).
19 See Price, p. 142.
20 There is a wealth of critical writing on La Chambre claire, and on the many fascinating aspects of Barthes’s
attitudes towards photography that I have no space to mention in this essay. See, for instance, the
articles in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and Nancy M. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in
Perspective (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).
21 Montier, p. 80.
 224 Akane Kawakami
22 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, p. 121. Henceforth references to this book will occur in the text,
preceded by CC.
23 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, p. 42. This text appears as an explanatory note opposite two photos of
the author, one taken in 1942 and the other in 1970.
24 This is the famous photograph of his mother as a child in the Winter Garden, the photograph which,
according to Barthes, captures her reality for him even though it predates his birth by quite some time.
25 Akane Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881–2004 (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 135–36.
26 The fallacious reasoning — or at least the wilfully wishful thinking — involved in this miraculous
transformation of light into flesh has been discussed in an excellent article by Elissa Marder, ‘Nothing to
Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Esprit créateur, 40.1 (Spring
2000), 25–35 (pp. 31–32).
27 The difficulty with this chain of reasoning, as indeed with the notion of ‘air’, is that it is not susceptible
to objective enquiry, precisely because it derives the general from the particular (‘la science impossible
de l’être unique’, p. 110). ‘Air’ is in fact reminiscent of aura in that it seems to exist in the eye of the
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

loving viewer, and is described at one point as ‘l’ombre lumineuse qui accompagne le corps’ (p. 168).
Unfortunately we cannot judge for ourselves, because Barthes does not include the photograph in his
book.
28 Whether or not this photograph existed in reality has been discussed by Diana Knight, who went on to
suggest that it might be a version of the ‘Souche’ photograph on p. 163 of La Chambre claire (Barthes and
Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 265–66). Margaret Olin
argues convincingly in favour of this hypothesis in ‘Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s “Mistaken”
Identification’, Representations, 80 (Autumn 2002), 99–118 (pp. 108–10).
29 This relationship of ‘outdoing’ is suggested by Sarkonak in Angelic Echoes: Hervé Guibert and Company,
p. 46 ff. For a fascinating and detailed account of L’Image fantôme and Guibert’s relationship with La
Chambre claire and Barthes, see Sarkonak, pp. 28–65.
30 Photographies, another album of Guibert’s photographs, was published posthumously by Gallimard in
1993.
31 The covers, for instance, of the Folio editions of A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie and Cytomégalovirus.
32 Sarkonak, p. 6.
33 Sarkonak, p. 13.
34 See, for instance, Jean-Pierre Boulé, Voices of the Self (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1999),
pp. 9–12.
35 Hans Georg Berger, L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photographies de Hans Georg
Berger (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1988).
36 Hervé Guibert, preface to L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photographies de Hans
Georg Berger.
37 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 4. Alain Buisine describes how, for Guibert,
photography is often ‘un exercice de la violence qui s’effectue au plus près de la mort’, ‘Le Photographique
plutôt que la photographie’, in Hervé Guibert, ed. by Jean-Pierre Boulé, special issue of Nottingham French
Studies, 34:1 (1995), 32–41 (p. 32).
38 L’Image fantôme (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1981), p. 164. Henceforth, all references to this book will
occur in the text, preceded by IF.
39 The photographs, which were taken between 1977 and 1984, were exhibited at the Agathe Gaillard
gallery in Paris in the autumn of 1984, before being published as a book by Éditions de Minuit.
40 Le seul visage (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984), p. 6.
41 In the eighteenth century, it was customary for men of taste and privilege to have a gallery of portraits
of their friends: Pope had one in his house in Twickenham.
42 In another essay, Guibert describes a different form of autobiographical endeavour through the
collection of portraits: not portraits of his friends but self-portraits of Rembrandt (see IF, p. 65).
43 Le seul visage, p. 7.
44 Barthes had noted, in La Chambre claire, that ‘l’âge de la Photographie correspond précisément à
l’irruption du privé dans le public, ou plutôt à la création d’une nouvelle valeur sociale, qui est la publicité
du privé: le privé est consommé comme tel, publiquement (les incessantes agressions de la Presse contre le
privé des vedettes et les embarras croissants de la législation témoignent de ce mouvement)’ (CC, p. 153).
 Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert 225
45 ‘Toute photographie est tombale’ (Buisine, p. 33).
46 Elsewhere, Guibert says that it would be wrong to put his favourite photos (by other photographers) into
an autobiographical text of his: ‘de quel droit accaparerais-je ces autres images, ces images d’autres, ces
positifs?’ (IF, p. 124).
47 Guibert’s obsession with Adjani is well known, and dated from her first appearances on the Paris stage
and the silver screen. François Buot, Hervé Guibert: le jeune homme et la mort (Paris: Grasset, 1999), p. 50.
48 Hervé Guibert, ‘Adjani où la vertu de l’excès’, Le Monde, 28 May 1981, p. 13.
49 In another essay of L’Image fantôme, Guibert tells us how irritating such ‘incarnation’ can be, for instance
on book covers (his example is the ubiquitous image of Gérard Philipe, as Julien Sorel, as a Dostoevsky
hero, and so on) (IF, p. 69).
50 Guibert first met her when she came to the offices of Le Monde to pick out some photographs, and in
his first interview he is said to have raised the subject of her almost maniacal attitude to photographs of
herself (Buot, p. 51).
51 Mechanical failures are frequent and significant in L’Image fantôme: ‘n’arrive-t-il pas fort souvent Hervé
Guibert est plus séduit par les photographies “ratées”, des photos loupées, floues ou mal cadrées?’ (Buisine,
Downloaded by [The University of Edinburgh] at 05:58 20 August 2017

p. 35).
52 ‘Le regard photographique est une espèce de fétichisme de la vue’ (IF, p. 110).
53 The story of their friendship reaches one version of a conclusion, an unhappy one, in A L’ami qui ne m’a
pas sauvé la vie.
54 In his preface to Le seul visage, Guibert describes this form of betrayal: ‘Dans l’écriture je n’ai pas de frein,
pas de scrupule, parce qu’il n’y a que moi, pratiquement, qui suis en jeu [...], tandis que dans la photo il
y a le corps des autres, des parents, des amis, et j’ai toujours une petite appréhension: ne suis-je pas en train
de les trahir en les transformant ainsi en objets de vision?’ (p. 5).
55 ‘La photographie identitaire fait abstraction de la durée en laquelle pourtant se meut tout sujet’ (Montier,
p. 74).
56 This episode is retold in Mes parents, but much more simply, with fewer Oedipal resonances. Mes parents
(Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 105–06.
57 Sarkonak describes the intertextual relationship between Guibert and Barthes with regard to
photography and mothers (pp. 47–51).
58 Sarkonak analyzes the Oedipal situation in detail, but does not consider the ageing of Guibert’s mother
to be a crucial factor in this essay (p. 48).
59 Compare with Barthes, CC, p. 105.
60 Although it is not explicitly discussed here, for the reasons suggested above, the ambivalent subject of
youth in photography and its disappearance in reality is much discussed in L’Image fantôme. ‘Exemple de
photo de famille’ ends with the tale of an unnamed woman, ‘Sa vieillesse venue, une femme, femme de
photographe, déchire toutes les photos de sa jeunesse, annule à la fois toute trace de sa beauté et la pratique
obstinée de son mari à vouloir la conserver, jalouse elle détruit sa momie de jeune fille’ (IF, p. 30).
61 This naming of a non-existent photograph as the source of his text on photography is another reference
to La Chambre claire. Sarkonak suggests that Guibert is trying here, again, to outdo Barthes: Barthes’s
‘source’ photograph is absent from his text because he judges that it would mean nothing to the reader,
whereas Guibert’s ‘source’ photograph does not even exist. See Sarkonak, p. 49.