Denis Roche: l'un écrit, l'autre photographie (review)

Denis Roche rose to prominence as a poet and literary critic in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in particular to his involvement with the review Tel Quel, but his work is also notable for its extensive engagement with, and use of, photography. Roche is a persistent explorer of the relationship between text and image, and the inevitable and yet antagonistic intersection of the two. Or, as he puts it in an interview in 1982, 'j'écris, donc je photographie'. In 1999, he published Le Boîtier de mélancholie, an anthology of images which sets out to tell the history of photography through 100 photographs. The title of the volume is a good indication of Roche's understanding of photography. In keeping with a number of prominent commentators, and in particular the Roland Barthes of La Chambre claire, Roche suggests that its cultural significance and distinctiveness lie above all in the questions it raises about time, temporality, nostalgia and loss. Such themes are also explored at length by the contributors to this collection of essays, which originates in a conference held in 2004, and represents the first extensive consideration of the role played by photography in Roche's work. Some essays (those by Damez, Baetens and Forest, for example) focus on his activities as a photographer and writer on photography. Others (such as Game, Quintyn and Westerhof) consider his examination of the relationship between text and image, the poetic and the photographic. The volume is also noteworthy for providing a complete bibliography of Roche's work (up to 2005) and interviews (up to 2001), as well as a chronology of his photographic exhibitions (up to 2006). Yet while the volume will undoubtedly provide a number of useful insights for specialists of Roche's work, it seems on the whole to be somewhat disconnected from the broader debates currently shaping photography studies. In the first place, the assertion of photography's privileged relationship to time, one which is latent throughout the collection of essays, and which emerges explicitly in Jean-Marie Gleize's preface (p. 16), increasingly appears to be a tired critical orthodoxy, and is made at the expense of understanding how the photograph functions as a spatial, or better, a spatio-temporal form. Secondly, the essays are striking for their unreflective celebration of Roche as an artist or auteur. At various points, we find contributors underlining Roche's visionary nature and the distinctiveness of his talent (Arrouye), or setting out to distinguish him from the modishness of contemporary trends (Baetens). Such an uncomplicated investment in the photographer as auteur sits uneasily in a context where the notion has been subjected to extensive debate, and so needs to be mobilized with a great deal of care. Moreover, it appears all the more ironic given that the individual concerned was himself presumably not unfamiliar with that debate during his time at Tel Quel all those years ago.