In Looking Back One Learns To See:Marcel Proust and Photography by Mary Bergstein (review)

Bergstein, Mary. In Looking Back One Learns To See: Marcel Proust and Photography. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3829-5. Pp. 303. $84. With its focus on the visual culture of Proust, Bergstein’s book considers imaginary photographs, fictitious works of art, and actual art objects as protagonists in À la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing from a vast archive of visual materials, including daguerrotypes, cartes-de-visite, postcards, architectural photography, and medical photography, the author situates Proust and his work with regards to photography as a cultural system. Her primary objective is to demonstrate photographic ways of seeing, informed by his encounters with photographic reproductions of art. The first chapter provides an overview of changing esthetic experiences in the late nineteenth century: though both engravings and photographic reproductions allowed spectators to encounter an artwork virtually before seeing it in person, Proust believed that photography was a mysterious medium with details that could awaken memories (41). The second chapter traces an informal historiography of art through close analysis of Proust’s personal “archive of images,” which she compares to Malraux’s idea of the “Musée imaginaire” developed in 1957 (47). This section analyzes Proust’s postcard collection and frequent visits to the Cabinet des estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale (his personal collection was presumably destroyed by a housekeeper).Especially original and provocative are chapters 3 and 4 that focus on the photographic practice of othering through a discussion of Jews and lesbians, construed as exotic peoples in the visual imagination of the French aristocracy. Bergstein claims that Proust constructed a “Jewish Orientalism” for characters such as Swann, Bloch, and Berma, using photographic reproductions of Assyrian reliefs at the British Museum (153), and speculates that Proust also used photographs from his father’s 1869 journey to the Middle East (162). The final chapters turn to a discussion of painting and photography: chapter 5 examines Proust’s encounter with Manet’s paintings Olympia and Lola de Valence, and chapter 6 insists on the importance of photographic reproductions that allowed Proust to know the works of master artists Botticelli,Vermeer, and da Vinci. This book recalls Eric Karpeles’s Painting in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (2008), which places reproductions of the images Proust surrounded himself with alongside direct quotations from the text. Bergstein’s contribution, however, is less of a guidebook for readers of Proust; she explores the visual conventions of photography in fin-de-siècle France, situating real and imagined photographic images within a larger sociocultural matrix. In addition, the high-quality plates (over one hundred illustrations ) are a delight. Bergstein’s study invites new questions about the visual culture of Proust for literary scholars, art historians, and lovers of the Belle Époque. University of California, Los Angeles Lauren Van Arsdall 212 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 ...