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Lookup NU author(s): Toby BlackmanORCiD
This is the final published version of a review published in its final definitive form in 2025. For re-use rights please refer to the publishers terms and conditions.
In 2003, Annie Ernaux picked up her camera, compelled to record the ‘clothing and lingerie, the shoes, scattered over the tiles of the corridor in the sun-light arrangement born of desire and accident, doomed to disappear,’ during a passionate, eight-month love affair with photographer and journalist, Marc Marie (Ernaux and Marie 2024, 11). A series of 35mm analogue rangefinder cameras were pressed into service for the intimate, collaborative work which followed, published by Éditions Gallimard in 2005 as L’Usage de la photo. This review offers a close reading of the first English translation of the original manuscript by Alison L. Strayer, The Use of Photography published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024. Marie first used Ernaux’s ‘heavy black Samsung,’ ‘then the Minolta that had belonged to his late father, and later the small Olympus that replaced my faulty Samsung’ (Ernaux and Marie 2024, 11). Marie took most of the photographs, Ernaux dismissing her own photography, which she claimed to have only ‘practised in a sporadic, absent-minded way’ until embarking on this collaboration (Ernaux and Marie 2024, 11). They agreed a simple, playful, and intimate framework for reviewing the shots, and subsequently ‘chose fourteen of the forty-odd photos and agreed that each would write separately, in total freedom, never show the other anything until it was done, or even change a word.’ Ernaux suggests, ‘The rule was strictly observed until the end’ (Ernaux and Marie 2024, 11). This review of The Use of Photography identifies an objective work of literary non-fiction, maintaining a critical distance from the subjects and objects of study — eroticism, photography, and the writing self — and simultaneously, a work of literary fiction, integrating theory and philosophy with autobiography, and an explicitly subjective mode of writing that which lies within and without the image.
Author(s): Blackman T
Publication type: Review
Publication status: Published
Journal: Visual Studies
Year: 2025
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 15/09/2027
Acceptance date: 30/06/2025
ISSN (print): 1472-586X
ISSN (electronic): 1472-5878
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2025.2552738
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2025.2552738
