Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé by Akane Kawakami (review)

How is self-narrative inflected by (knowledge of) photography? What does it mean to think and to write a life ‘photographically’? Akane Kawakami’s insightful book contributes to the growing subset of autobiography studies that sets out to answer such questions. It provides close readings of photographic writings and photographs by three key figures whose perception and self-perception are intricately linked to the lens: Hervé Guibert, Annie Ernaux, and Gérard Macé. Original material derived from interviews with Ernaux and Macé is woven into the book. Chapters devoted to each practitioner are preceded by a shorter foundational chapter on Marcel Proust, who is presented as a powerfully influential antecedent and seen as kick-starting many of the ongoing dialogues between writing and photography that still preoccupy contemporary photobiographers. Between them, Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé provide a fascinating span of experimental approaches that illustrate the impact of technological developments and the evolution of photobiography over some thirty years. Kawakami’s readings are subtle and detailed and characterize with clarity what she sees as the personal photographic idiom of each œuvre. For Guibert, photography is an ‘act of love’ (p. 78) that accesses and probes intimate truths about other, self, and the relationships that bind them. For Ernaux, photographs are cues and models for writing, predominantly bound up with her ambition to document and ‘prove’ the real. For Macé, photography is a form of selfcreation, giving rise in this study to lovely developments on dream and photography; on making photographs without a camera; on frames and what is beyond them; on illusion and shadows. The contextualizing material, which sets the selected corpus within a broader perspective, is established by reference to perennial debates — about photography and imagination, the real, memory, death, longing, invention, performativity, ethics, etc. — and also to the landmark figures of Proust and Roland Barthes. Proust’s enthralment by photographs and photographic vision produces an interesting first chapter, but one whose structural relationship to the rest of the book is slightly uneasy. There is not really a strong narrative here about how Proust has inspired Guibert, Ernaux, and Macé, and it is not clear that they sustain a relationship with him that is more ‘special’ (p. 2) than the one they sustain with Barthes. Indeed Barthes’s influence on them is probably referred to more often than Proust’s. Other minor caveats are that the determination to characterize given aspects of writing as photographic feels somewhat strained on occasion; and that the study would have been enriched by greater reference to the wider history of the photographic image (how Macé’s shadows conjure up those of André Kertész; how Ernaux’s attentiveness to the everyday partakes of a wider trend in contemporary photography). Overall, though, this is an important addition to literature on the subject. Kawakami’s conclusion is that we are entering a new age of writing about ourselves photographically. Researchers exploring the self-perceptions that are made available in the lens-inflected self-narratives of this new age will surely gain from setting their findings into context by reading this extremely rewarding study.