Les Mythologies individuelles: récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle by Magali Nachtergael (review)

This study of how photography and individual identity interact in literary texts is a welcome addition to a growing body of theory in France on the intermediality of text and image. We are given the opportunity to revisit key moments in twentieth-century radical art history and review their shifts and mutations through the lens (as it were) not just of photography but also, now, of the photo-text. A good example of this revisiting, and one that Magali Nachtergael's book could have made more of, is that of surrealism and its links to structuralism, post-structuralism, and other radical formalisms of the 1960s. Instead, the study makes two claims: the 'pratiques du livre héritées des surréalistes et situationnistes sont replacées dans un espace social postmoderne, désormais habitué aux médias et éveillé aux fonctions marchandes et mythologisantes des images' (p. 198); and 'la photographie dans le livre, tout particulièrement quand ce dernier met en scène le récit d'une vie, a modifié radicalement la perception de l'identité' (p. 269). The trouble is, in my view, that this is far too ambitious for one book. Although the study looks usefully at Mallarmé's 'Livre' (but omits Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's two-volume work The Photobook: A History (London: Phaidon, 2004-06), published in French as early as 2007), it is a risky strategy to open up the study to the nineteenth century (including discussion of Georges Rodenbach), as it significantly reduces the time and energy spent on the 'postmodern era'. This is to the detriment of a wider philosophical discussion of 'identity', especially in relation to the de-individuation analysed by structuralism. One of the book's key assumptions/claims is that recent interest in auto-fiction is traceable to the late 1970s in France, which is coterminous with a marked growth of photo-texts of all sorts. Indeed, the 1980s was a key decade for the published meeting of photography and text, and in which photo-autobiographie played an important role. Bringing together the work of Christian Boltanski, Guy Debord, and Sophie Calle, Nachtergael discusses at length Roland Barthes's writings, using Jacqueline Guittard's recent work on Mythologies to suggest that the famous critique of petit-bourgeois ideology is also a form of autocritique. She also valorizes material excluded from Barthes's 1980 photo-essay La Chambre claire. This scholarship stands in marked contrast, however, to knowledge of Barthes's published work. For example, she claims that Barthes's treatment of 1950s myth served to 'evacuate' certain 'notions de sacré, de rituel, d'intemporalité et d'imaginaire collectif ' (p. 10), without mentioning the 'happy' myths in Mythologies which do feature these elements (namely, 'Le Monde où l'on catche', 'Au music-hall', 'Le Tour de France comme épopée', 'L'Usager de la grève', 'La Nouvelle Citroën', 'Paris n'a pas été inondé', even 'Jouets'). Thus the Barthes material and the treatment of Breton, Apollinaire, and Cendrars suffer from the speed needed to get to the end of the twentieth century. Overall, this book should be two books, one on literature and photography and the other on photography and self in the photo-text.