Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography

2. Chronicles of Intimacy: Photography in Autobiographical Projects

51 Chronicles of Intimacy Photography in Autobiographical Projects Shirley Jordan We must obtain our own negative And rather than develop it, hollow it out. ■ Roberto Juarroz, Quinzième poésie verticale How do photography and lived experience fold into one another? Writers of autobiographical narratives have long experimented with the question, using photographs as catalysts that raise questions about ontology, identity, memory, and evidence. Through moments of self-reflection, self-knowledge, or self-alienation, through the stories and the ekphrastic forays they generate, photographic images buttress or buffet our sense of self. As a starting point for this discussion of photography and the autobiographical subject, I want to use the idea, expressed by Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz and adopted by Camille Laurens for her phototext Cet absent-là [That Missing 52 Chronicles of Intimacy One], of hollowing into one’s negative. What does this metaphor suggest? A paradoxical insistence on photographic absence; a curiosity about photographic processes; rejection of fixity and finish in favor of the undeveloped; an interest less in seeing the self in photography than thinking the self through photography. Juarroz’s suggestions have a distinctly autofictional resonance consistent with the contemporary urge to use photographs in autobiographical investigations as other than straight “evidence” of self-presence. They prompt us to ask: how close can we get to ourselves through photographs? What good is photography as autobiographical evidence? This chapter discusses some of the distinctive ways in which autobiographical accounts in French have, in recent years, increasingly been constructed around photographs and ideas of photography. It focuses on a cluster of experiments that not only combine text and image but are saturated in photography , driven or persistently underwritten by its practices and theories. These are Camille Laurens’s Cet absent-là, Marie NDiaye’s Autoportrait en vert [Self-Portrait in Green], Anne Brochet’s Trajet d’une amoureuse éconduite [The Journey of a Woman Dismissed by Her Lover], and Annie Ernaux’s and Marc Marie’s L’Usage de la photo [The Use of Photography]. Each of these authors has produced just one phototext thus far, and the contemporaneous publication of these is indicative of a distinct photographic turn in contemporary life writing in French. Such a turn is evidenced too by recently forged coinages, from “photobiography” to “photoautobiography” or “(phauto)biography” (one is tempted to add “[phauto]fiction ”). These four experiments in chronicling lives through photographs and photographic conceits have, as we shall see, much in common and allow us to take a snapshot of the kinds of projects involving photography that were being elaborated in the mainstream at a particular moment. 53 Shirley Jordan Before I turn to the texts, I want to address the terms of my title. As “chronicle” suggests, I shall be concerned not with isolated photographs but with series of photographs used to document a specific event, period, or phenomenon. I am also interested in the relationship between the recourse to photography and the emphasis on intimacy in autobiographical and autofictional accounts. As it explores the potential of telling through showing, visual autobiography plays with photography’s propensity to position us as intimates, privy to what only those closest to the autobiographical subject would normally see: the grain of the skin, a pile of soiled clothes, the uninspiring contents of a cupboard, a slept-in bed. Serge Tisseron’s psychoanalytically driven account of why photography is such an intimate medium is useful here, explaining both the excitement and the unease the medium can generate. Tisseron argues that photography’s fascinating seductiveness , its emotional and sensory appeal, and the dynamic of boundaries and barriers that it raises are bound up with Lacan’s mirror stage and with the tension between distance and a presymbolic experience of skin-on-skin parental contact. He suggests that development of the visual is compensatory and emphasizes the privileged appeal to touch of photography: more than painting, it provides the illusion that we really can touch what it shows (132–36). Poised between “representation ” and “containment,” it is a medium wherein “the ‘silky,’ the ‘velvety,’ the ‘grainy’ are represented in an almost tactile way” (123). Further, the photograph permits a peculiar sense of possession of the photographed subject, the like of which is not provided by textual or filmed accounts. It is transportable , ever available for scrutiny, ever open to the caress of the eye, and each look we cast upon it is latently weighted by...