Ghost Image 9780226132488

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GHOST IMAGE

B o o k s b y H e r v é G u i b e rt Suzanne et Louise (Libres Hallier, 1980) Les aventures singulières (Éditions de Minuit, 1982) Les chiens (Éditions de Minuit, 1982) Voyage avec deux enfants (Éditions de Minuit, 1982) L’Image fantôme (Éditions de Minuit, 1982) Les lubies d’Arthur (Éditions de Minuit, 1983) L’homme blessé de Patrice Chérau (Éditions de Minuit, 1983) Des aveugles (Gallimard, 1985) Mes parents (Gallimard, 1986) Le seul visage (Éditions de Minuit, 1986) [photography] Vous m’avez fair former des fantômes (Gallimard, 1987) Les gangsters (Éditions de Minuit, 1988) Fou de Vincent (Éditions de Minuit, 1989) L’Incognito (Gallimard, 1989) A l’ami qui ne m’a pas savvé la vie (Gallimard, 1990) Le protocol compassionnel (Gallimard, 1991) La Mort Propagande (Gallimard, 1992) L’Homme au chapeau rouge (Gallimard, 1994) Cytomegalovirus: Journal d’hospitalisation (Seuil Points edition, 2004) Mon valet et moi (Seuil Points edition, 2007) Mauve le vierge (Gallimard, 2007) Le Mausolée des amants (Gallimard, 2011) Lettres à Eugène (Gallimard, 2013) Vice (Gallimard, 2013)

Hervé Guibert

ghost image Translated from the French by Robert Bononno

The Universit y of Chicag o Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Copyright © 1982 by Les Éditions de Minuit English language translation © 1996 by Robert Bononno All rights reserved Originally published as L’Image fantôme (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982) University of Chicago Press edition 2014 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13234-1 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13248-8 (e-book) DOI: 10.728/chicago/9780226132488.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guibert, Hervé, author. [Image fantôme. English] Ghost image / Hervé Guibert ; translated from the French by Robert Bononno. pages ; cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-226-13234-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-13248-8 (e-book) 1. Photography—Philosophy. 2. Photographic criticism. I. Bononno, Robert, translator. II. Title. TR183.G8413 2014 770.1—dc23 2013042067 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

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27 29 32 43 45 51 53 55 58 59 63 65 66 67 68

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"I used to dream ... " Ghost Image First Love The Perfect Image The Erotic Picture Photo Souvenir (East Berlin) A Family Photograph A Fantasy 1 Inventory of a Box of Photographs A Possible Photo Sequence for Bernard Faucon Home Movies Holography Identity Photograph I Identity Photograph II Photobooth (Florence) Self-Portrait The Album The x-ray Identification The Hotel Room Example of a Travel Photograph Photographic Writing Contact Sheet The Insult

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85 86 87 89 90 91 92 94

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II5 II6 II7 II8 124

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126 12 9 13 1

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The Camera The Fetish The Threat A Fantasy II "The majority of your stories ... " Diffraction The Rings Premeditation The Session Advice The Beautiful Image Suite, Series, Sequence Pornography Porno Bis Red Tape The Collection The Fovea The Bus Dance Polaroid Favorite Photographs The Article "Photography has infiltrated your life ... " A Fantasy III The Betrayal The Proof The Retouching Artist The Fake Transparencies The Pharmacist of Rue Vaugirard

page 7 137 • 141 • 143 • 146 • 150 • 152 • 153 • 154 • 159 •

The Photograph, as Close to Death as Possible A Fantasy iv A Cruel Act Proof by the Absurd A Memorial for Simple Hearts “T. told me…” Return to the Beloved Image The Cancerous Image Secrets

page 33 selves or the pictures from a photobooth. That’s because prints were expensive then and my parents, people of

page 35 photographed me—…while crying, or bleeding, after an accident, angry, running away?)

page 57 of my face was covered by a doctor’s speculum or a pair of upside down headphones. I had never gone to that particular party, I had never seen this young man. I knew very well that that face could only be my own (or that of my double?) and that at the same time, it couldn’t be me.

I USED TO DREAM about an amazing invention I saw in one of my Bibi Fricotin*: eyeglasses that can read our thoughts. But I grew frightened when I realized that they could be used against me. Later on, in some slightly lurid advertisements, I discovered the existence of eyeglasses that can see through clothing, that can expose us. I pictured photography as having the ability to combine these two powers. I was tempted to do a self-portrait. ..

*

A series of picture books for children. Tr.

GHOST IMAGE

PH 0 TOG RAP H Y is also an act of love. Once, when my parents were still living in La Rochelle, in that large bright apartment entirely surrounded by a balcony overlooking the trees in the park and, a little further off, the sea, I decided to take a picture of my mother. I must have been eighteen years old, and I had returned home for the weekend. I suppose it was Mayor June, a sunny day, a day of cool, fresh, and gentle sunshine. I had already photographed her on vacation with my father, without giving it much thought. They were quite ordinary pictures that said nothing of the relationship we may have had, of the attachment I may have felt for her, pictures that stubbornly revealed only a part of her, a physiognomy. Besides, most of the time my mother refused to be photographed, pretending that she was not photogenic, that the situation immediately put her on edge. If I was eighteen, it must have been in 1973, and my mother, who was born in 1928, must have been forty-five, an age when she was still quite beautiful, but a desperate age, when I felt that she was at the threshold of old age, of sadness. I should mention that until then I had refused to photograph her because I didn't like her hairstyle, which was artificially curled and lacquered into one of those terrible hairdos that my mother wore, alternating it with her

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permanents, and that encumbered her face, framed it inappropriately, hid it, falsified it. My mother was one of those women who take pride in resembling an actress, Michele Morgan in this case, and who go to their hairdresser with a picture taken from some magazine, so that the stylist, with the picture as his guide, re-creates for her the identical hair style. So my mother had her hair done almost like Michele Morgan, whom I obviously began to hate. My father forbade my mother to wear makeup or dye her hair, and when he photographed her he ordered her to smile, or he took the picture against her will while pretending to adjust the camera, so that she had no control over her image. The first thing I did was to remove my father from the room where the picture was to be taken, to chase him away so that her image would no longer pass through the one he had created of her, through his need to keep up appearances, so that she was thus temporarily freed of all the pressure that had built up over more than twenty years, so that there was nothing left but our own complicity, free of husband and father, just a mother and her son. (Wasn't it in fact my father's death that I wanted to stage?) The second thing was to rescue her face from that mess of a hairdo. As she crouched in the bathroom, I put her head under the faucet myself so that her hair would uncurl, and placed a towel over her head to keep her shoulders from getting wet. She was wearing a white slip. I had her tryon several old dresses (I remembered them from my childhood), for example, the blue dress with flounces and white polka dots, which I associate with Sunday, with

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festivity, with summer, with pleasure; but either my mother could no longer "get into the dress," or the dress seemed too much to me, it assumed too much importance, was too loud, and ended up "hiding" my mother again, but in an entirely different way than my father had, although in retrospect, all our efforts served only to reveal her further. I combed her blonde shoulder-length hair for a long time so that it would hang absolutely straight on either side of her face, without volume, without form, letting the purity of her features show: her long, straight nose, her narrow jaw, her high cheekbones, and-why not, even if the photograph would be in black and white-her blue eyes. I put a little powder on her-very pale powder, almost white. Then I led her into the living room, which was bathed in light, a gentle warm light, the enveloping and restful light of summer's beginning. I placed one of the white armchairs among the green plants, the fig tree, the rubber tree, angled so that the light would fall more gently upon it, and I lowered the blind a little to soften the light's intensity, which threatened to obliterate and flatten her face. I then removed anything "distracting" from the field of view, like the plexiglass table where the TV guides lay. My mother was sitting straight up in that armchair in her slip with the towel on her shoulders, waiting, but without any sign of stiffuess, for me to finish my preparations. I noticed that her features had already relaxed, and that the little wrinkles that threatened to pinch her mouth had completely disappeared. (For a moment I was able to stop time and old age. Through my love for my mother, I turned back.) There she sat, majestic, like a queen before an execution. (I won-

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der now if it wasn't her own execution she was expecting, for once the picture was taken, the image fixed, the process of aging would continue, and this time at a dizzying speed, and at an age between forty-five and fifty, when it so brutally takes hold of a woman. I knew that once the shutter was released she would let herself go with detachment, with serenity, with an absolute resignation, and that she would continue to live with this deteriorating image without trying to recapture it in front of a mirror with beauty creams and masks ... ) I took her picture. At that moment, she was at the height of her beauty, her face completely smooth and relaxed. She didn't speak as I moved around her, and there was an imperceptible smile on her lips, undefinable, of peace, of happiness, as if she were being bathed by the light, as if this whirlwind circling slowly around her, at a distance, were the most gentle caress. I believe that at that moment she was happy with the image that I, her son, allowed her to have and that I was capturing without my father's knowledge. In fact, it's that: the image of a woman who has always been criticized by her husband, enjoying what she could never have, a forbidden image, and the pleasure between us was even greater as the forbidden burst into pieces. It was a suspended moment, a moment of peace, serene. In some of the pictures, I had her put on a big straw hat folded back, which was for me the young boy's hat in Death in Venice and which I occasionally wore. In addition, I may have been projecting my own image onto my mother's; wasn't the image of my adolescent desire also a confidence I made her assume?

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The session was over. My father returned. My mother put her dress back on and quickly redid her hair with the help of curlers and a hair dryer. She became once again her husband's wife, the woman of forty-five, while the photograph, instantaneously, as if by magic, had suspended age, had made it only an absurd social convention. At that moment, my mother had been beautiful, more beautiful than she had ever been as a young woman. That is what I wanted to believe. I no longer recognized her, I wanted to forget her, to stop seeing her, to remain forever with the image we were going to extract from the developer. My father had just bought the camera, a Rollei 35, and it was the first time I had used it. He had also bought a developing kit, which he had set up in the bathroom. We decided to process the film right away, and the time it took to process it corresponded to the time it took my mother to remove the powder from her face, dry her hair, and restore her earlier image. That earlier image had been totally, irrevocably reconstructed as we tried to create the chance image, the subversive image of the photograph. But that image didn't exist. Looking through the film against the bluish light of the bathroom, we saw that the entire roll of film was unexposed, blank from one end to the other. Since it was my father who had done the processing, and since the image that he was reluctantly supposed to develop was a denial of the one he had spent twenty years creating, for an instant I thought that this was a plot, a diversion, a mistake in processing, even if unconscious. But I had to confront the evidence: I hadn't completely attached the film in the camera. 0Ne hadn't? I no longer remember.) It

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had slipped off the small black teeth that held it in place and advanced it, and I had photographed nothing. Blank, the essential moment lost, sacrificed. It was the opposite of awakening from a nightmare: the development of the film was like awakening from a dream-session, which, instead of being wiped away at once, becomes, with the reality of the absence of an image, a nightmare rather than a dream. For my mother and myself it was a moment of despondency and pain, a sensation of powerlessness, of fatality, of irremediable loss. It wasn't a fire that had destroyed all our personal belongings, our intimate letters, photographs of our childhood. It might as well have been that fire. There was no question of doing the session over, it was impossible. That blank moment (that blank death? since one can shoot "blanks") remained between my mother and me with the secret power of incest. It had imposed a silence between us. We never spoke about it, and I never photographed her again. And she grew old as I had suspected. In one year ten years passed. She had remained a fortyyear-old woman but she became a fifty-year-old woman. Every time I saw her, I could barely look at her: the wrinkles that pinched her lips, hardened her mouth, that imperceptible rosiness, the slight fuzz that covered her cheeksthey all provoked my aversion. It hurt me to kiss her. It seemed as if I were awaiting her disfigurement. Only when she was old could I look at her again, love her again. My parents had to move. They had to leave the large bright living room where the drama, in negativo, had taken

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place. They went to live in a flat and monotonous suburb. My father gave me the small camera. He bought a bigger one. To hand the big camera to his son gave my father pleasure, and he asked me to photograph my mother. All three of us found ourselves in the big living room for the last time before the move. In the viewfinder, the blank moment flashed with the same frequency as the small red light that indicated the right exposure, like a stabbing pain in my stomach, and at that very moment my mother's face suddenly, unexpectedly, relaxed, rebelled, miraculously resumed the expression I had given her during our first session. Through the viewfinder, in the space of an instant, my mother became beautiful again. It seemed that she was trying to convey to me a message of her sadness. So this text will not have any illustrations except for a piece of blank film. For the text would not have existed if the picture had been taken. The picture would be in front of me, probably framed, perfect and false, even more unreal than a photograph from childhood-the proof, the evidence of an almost diabolical practice. More than a bit of sleight-of-hand or prestidigitation-a machine to stop time. For this text is the despair of the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged image-a ghost image ...

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FIRST LOVE

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH S I ever liked were the ones that appeared on record jackets, and later, movie postersthe ones that showed a singer or an actor. Their bodies, their faces. I used to kiss them. Some of them had been signed. I put them under the glass that was supposed to protect the oak surface of the dresser. When I withdrew my lips from the glass, I would momentarily leave a mist, which I would erase with a quick motion of my sleeve. Now it would make me smile to reveal the name of the singer or actor-does indeed make me smile-an operetta singer who was almost my father's double, Georges Guetary, and then Terence Stamp in the role of Toby Dammit. I was twelve-and-a-hal£ My parents took me to the movies only to see Louis de Funes on Sunday afternoon, or Pouic-Pouic, or The Hibernatus. The Fellini sketch in Spirits if the Dead was an accident. I at once fell in love with this kind of image, this kind of film, and for the first time I fell in love with a man's image, an extremely morbid image, the image of the devil. My father took me to the Rank casting office (I remember the story now since I've just read in the papers that Rank has gone out of business), where he had given five francs to a doorman, and we left with two film stills. Though they weren't for sale, I managed to get hold of them. They

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had repeatedly been tacked up in the window displays in front of movie houses. With a piece of cotton lightly dipped in alcohol, I carefully tried to remove the stickers promoting the film's distribution, because they covered the image with names I wanted to chase away, the names of other idols who had unfairly been given top billing (Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon). Beneath the glass on the dresser, the light discolored the ektachrome print; the yellows became yellower, the greens greener, at once more transparent and more saturated, like a picture taken through a filter. I can still see those photos very clearly, but I don't want to return to them, they have been with me for too long; now they are at the bottom of a box. They were repeatedly tacked to the canvas that covered the wall, then glued, then unglued from a door. Always too large or too small to be hung. Too often seen as well, seen to the point of becoming invisible, irritating. In the first (I don't know why, really, I just decided it was first), against a yellow background, Terence Stamp is wearing a black jacket with a high collar. His unkempt yellow hair, dirty and discolored, falls on his shoulders. His skin is waxy, and someone has drawn a spider over his left eyebrow. He looks into the camera. His two hands, joined together, are stretched toward the edge of the picture frame. He extends them toward the pretty blond girl with the cunning smile and very pale skin who tosses a ball that is too light across the airport lobby, and who will soon toss his head along the fallen bridge after the accident in the Alfa Romeo. In the second picture, with the greenish background, we see him standing on the same bridge; perhaps he is already dead, but he has returned.

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He is wearing a pair of mauve satin pants and an open white shirt revealing a sweaty chest; he looks haggard, the spider still hanging over his eyebrow. At night, when I go to sleep, I move over to make room in my bed for the people in the picture. And I talk to them under the sheets ...

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THE PERFECT IMAGE

ISLE OF ELBA, August, 1979. I'm leading the life of a convalescent here, dazed by the lack of activity. I've been alone all afternoon in this sacristy made to look like a bedroom, while the others went to the beach. I daydream, I sleep, I read a little, I try to write without really wanting to. Nothing seems to work ... Then, like some insidious evil, the frustration of not being able to photograph creeps up on me. I had thought about getting rid of the camera, of giving it away, of putting it away forever. But this morning, because the sirocco was blowing hard and there would soon be a storm at sea, we went by car down to Rio Marina to watch the waves along the jetty. When I arrived, I was struck by a scene whose fragility I sensed and that angered me because I was unable to record it. I seethed with rage because I didn't have the necessary equipment with me as the image decomposed and crumbled into pieces before suddenly transforming itself into a regret. Between the jetty and another stone embankment there was a narrow strip of beach where the sea came crashing down, and on this gray tone, lightly tinged with blue, brilliant in its intensity, four young boys stood in a row beneath the great foaming mass, a small distance from one another, facing the water, braving the waves that washed over them, allowing themselves to be rolled around by them.

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Why do I want to photograph this? I should really ask, why do I find this image "perfect?" Looking at that scene, I already see the picture that will represent it and the abstraction that will automatically result, setting off the four boys in a kind of fictive space beneath the foaming waves. First, there is the blinding, almost white, already abstract intensity of the storm, of the hot wind, the sirocco, which causes giddiness and somnolence and is said to provoke homicidal dreams. Then, just below, the four boys themselves, who form in the distance separating us, a strange, perfectly ordered image-strange their slim, dorsal nudity, though one is covered with fat and another is crowned with a plastic shower cap that molds his head. Their alignment, the equidistance that separates them on this thin strip of beach, is perfect. But soon the scene broke apart and lost its perfection. Now the fat boy has left the water and climbed up the beach to dry himself and change his bathing suit; there are only two boys left in the foaming surf, including the one with the shower cap, and the picture is already more ordinary, the order, the equidistance is broken; the mass of fat has disappeared, and I am already beginning to regret that I was unable to capture the moment that has passed, the perfect composition. I could return tomorrow at the same time if the sirocco continues to blow, and certainly people will continue to tumble around in the waves, the intensity of the light will be the same; but I know that this picture has been lost and I will never again feel that same emotion. Even if I were sure that those four boys would return tomorrow to the same spot, to let me capture their silhouettes (which I doubt, obviously), I suspect that this recom21

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posed image will no longer please me in the same way, or with as much force, since it will have had time to make its way to my head, there to crystallize into a perfect image, and the photographic abstraction will happen by itself on the sensitized surface of memory, to be developed and fixed by writing, which I have resorted to only to free myself of my photographic regret. It seems to me now that this process of writing has surpassed and enriched the immediate act of photographic transcription, and that if tomorrow I tried to rediscover the real image in order to photograph it, it would appear dull. If I had photographed it at once, and if the picture had turned out "well" (that is, faithful to the memory of my emotion), it would have become mine. But the act of photographing it would have obliterated all memory of the emotion, for photography envelops things and causes forgetfulness, whereas writing, which it can only hinder, is a melancholy act, and the image would have been "returned" to me as a photograph, as an estranged object that would bear my name and that I could take credit for, but that would always remain foreign to me Oike a once familiar object to an amnesiac).

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THE EROTIC PICTURE

My

FIR S T erotic picture, discovered in the dusty shop window of a bookstore on the Avenue Reille among the musical camemberts, the marbles, and the plastic spiders, was of a tiny woman in a bathing suit whose clothes came off when a small tab was pulled. The picture was in color, and all you had to do to see her breasts was make that small gesture, like pulling the tab of a magic slate. I dreamed about pulling that tab, only I was never able to, because I was always accompanied by my parents and without money. I was also afraid that the woman with the tab would have a surprise in store for me, since she was located among a group of novelty items-maybe I would find a red jack-inthe-box in place of her stomach, or maybe, at the last moment, she would metamorphose into a policeman or a goat ... On another occasion during this same period (I must have been between five and ten years old), I took advantage of my mother's gossiping with the owner and surreptitiously opened one of the first issues of Lui lying on top of a pile. I came upon a double-page color spread of Claudia Cardinale, whom I recognized from having seen in one of my mother's magazines, lying naked on her stomach on an animal rug. What excited me in this picture, which was really quite chaste and mimicked the studio pose of a baby's

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pink and powdered behind, were the breasts that were not shown, and especially to imagine the contact between her breasts and the fur, of those two soft globes being compressed by a material even more diabolically soft, if the fur was anything like my mother's (beaver?). Only I didn't imagine her breasts pressed against the fur; I imagined that they were exactly placed in two hollows dug into the floorboards beneath the fur, like an egg cup or a jewel case. The picture startled me. No sooner did I catch a glimpse of it than, out of amazement, as well as out of fear of being caught, I closed the magazine. I was obsessed with her and had only one thought-to return. But the next time, as soon as my mother turned her back to me and I made my way to the pile, I found a different issue of Lui. The picture had been snatched from me. (The rhythm of the magazine distribution system is really unrelenting. Imagine a fiveyear-old boy ordering a back issue of Lui from his bookstore along with his Pim Pam Poum and his Roudoudou?) I was unhappy. I have never seen that picture since. I've thought of finding it again more than once. (A few years later, I cut out the same picture of a fur rug from the back pages of L'Express, but this time it was Burt Reynolds instead of Claudia Cardinale. I'm told he caused a scandal by posing nude for a woman's magazine.) During my early adolescence, I never had an orgasm. I wanted to but didn't know how. No one had told me. I was jealous of my friends when they boasted, during English class, of the number of washcloths they had soaked. I was afraid of stains (my mother was very suspicious about my laundry). And then, my father told me it was bad to mas-

turbate, that it would make you weak and even an imbecile if you did it too often. In addition, I confused erection and masturbation-I thought the two words referred to the same activity. I went to a film distributor to buy two sets of pictures from the film the Saryricon, which had just been released. Among them was a photograph of a beardless Hiram Keller, completely naked except for his sex, which was sheathed in a golden codpiece, and the fine leather strap against his chest attached to a quiver slung across his back. He was holding the hand of a woman in a loin cloth, her hair crowned with a tiara. This picture always gave me a hard-on and often, when I came home from school, out of breath, I took it from its envelope, then opened my fly and placed my erect sex exactly over the photograph. It entirely covered the shrunken body in the picture that brought it to life and that it dominated (it was hardly bigger than one of my tin soldiers). And I stayed like that for a long time, motionless, erect but inactive over the photograph, as if hypnotized, until I grew tired or hungry, or was disturbed by the first sound of a footstep.

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PHOTO SOUVENIR

(East Berlin)

N. gave me his photograph and, of course, I didn't recognize him. I see only a better looking and more relaxed young man. But I can discover nothing of his original charmhis gentle smile, the indecisive wrinkle of his laugh. His address is written on the back of the photograph. I examine this face in vain, I can't bring it any closer to the face I knew, I can't reconstruct it. Yet I know that that face, the real one, is going to disappear completely from my memory, driven out by the tangible proof of the image. But soon, the image will mean nothing to me, and my only choice will be to throw it away or to hold on to it-the fragile souvenir of a hypocritical affection ...

A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH

FA MILY PH 0 T 0 S are kept in shoe boxes, heaped up hap-

hazardly in old glove boxes, empty tins of Christmas chocolate. We rarely look at them, and we can grab them by the handful, in bunches, like some worthless object we can freely abuse (a material that holds up and that we even take pleasure in mishandling-just a little). They are the kind of photographs that quickly turn yellow and crack around the edges whenever they're exposed to light or handled too often (after a while, light always revenges itself for having been taken prisoner-it gathers itself back). So family pictures remain in their little cardboard coffins where we can forget them; like crosses planted in the ground, they arouse a melancholy pleasure. When we open the box, the death within is immediately obvious, and life, both of them knotted and wrapped together, covering and hiding one another. My grandmother kept a number of miscellaneous objects together in an envelope-bits of thread, stamps, bobby pins, mother-of-pearl buttons-which she had marked to remind her of the contents, "unimportant odds and ends." She probably never had any use for them, all the objects were mismatched. Nothing is written on the box of photographs, but we could just as easily mark it "important little mementos." The photograph marks our life at birth, then

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marriage-those are the two major events. Meanwhile, like the chalk marker on a measuring stick or the tiny growth fissures that appear on a bone, at each birthday it follows the growth of the body, then forgets it, then disclaims it. The adult body, the body no longer virgin, the aging body falls into a black pit-it is no longer photogenic. With old age, a woman, a photographer's wife, will tear up all the photographs of her youth. Annulling at the same time any trace of her beauty and her husband's obstinate habit of wanting to preserve it, she jealously destroys the mummy of the young girl she once was. I'm twenty-four years old, but in the presence of those I love, my earlier image has already become almost painful to me, intolerable. I would prefer to hide it. I'm afraid they'll like the image and go no further.

A FANTASY

THE ACTION takes place in a studio before a white background that eliminates the likelihood of any visual "apprehension" and allows for the free play of shadows. It is lit on the diagonal by a window that gives light during a complete solar cycle, from dawn till dusk. In this scene, two young men are the actors. They are tall and thin with disheveled hair and the eyes of wild dogs. For accessories, there are petticoats, star-spangled fairies' hats draped with tulle, as well as sailor caps with pompons, military hats, several very simple masks without any recognizable features, like Chinese masks, blindfolds, burlesque props, noisemakers, peashooters, false stomachs and beards, Punchinello noses, horsehair humps that attach to the stomach with straps, fezzes, dresses, geometric instruments, squares and large compasses. The young men enact a series of tableaux with all these accessories, a dance, movements. Their bodies shift in space, assume precise points, still or in motion, at varying distances from the studio's white backdrop, flat up against it or in front of it. A chair or a stool holds the props as well as the dresses. The photographic strategy is quite simple and invariable, the framing always the same, encompassing the entire white backdrop and spilling over onto the sides (how beautiful are the old, imperfect anthropometric photo-

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graphs), with the camera mounted on a tripod as if to paralyze the photographer, limiting him to recording the different phases of the action and the dance with the changing light. We can imagine the scene happening again, in exactly the same way on a different day (the actors would have the earlier photographs as models, witnesses), but this time the camera will have freed itself from its tripod so as to touch the actors, encircle them, caress them, letting the photographer, suddenly silent (the previous time he never stopped talking), turn around them in a slow, steady dance in order to record certain details of their bodies and isolate certain gestures. Their couplings, in short. So what is actually occurring? A dress entirely covers the stool. In the end, the actors are wearing long wigs of stiff hair, and when they dance together, quite closely, too thin for their billowy, low-cut evening gowns, the blades of an invisible fan make their hair fly around. That is the final picture, the one before it being similar, but without the wigs or the wind, just their juvenile crewcuts (a reminder of the students' dance at the end of Pasolini's Salo). But before this, the bodies must exchange places, sometimes seated, sometimes standing, face-to-face or back-toback, and always a little out of synch with one another, one leaping, while the other, for example, slouches on the stool-a change of dynamic, of thrust. The bodies then perform gymnastics, carrying in turn the different props, the fairy petticoats, the fezzes and magic wands, the false humps or artificial stomachs (while one of the two boys buries a plastic sword in the other's belly). But they do not play old-fashioned games like leapfrog-there are only the

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two of them, mimicking porters bearing an absent third person (he enters suddenly into a corner of the field of view, masked like a jack-in-the-box), shooting pellets with their peashooters and kicking one another like Guignol and Gnafron. A series of drawings could minutely render their positions, but writing could fix them as well. As for the geometric instruments, the compass and the giant square, they describe for those bodies, now stuck as if by centrifugal force against the backdrop, the more acrobatic positions of pinned or double-jointed bodies, bodies like marionettes. Satie's Gymnopedie could provide the musical accompaniment for the action, but silence would be preferable. The sequence could be called "Helter Skelter." Its description is a photographic illusion; it is also an enumeration of the illusions that a photographer can create with two bodies.

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INVENTORY OF A

Box

OF PHOTOGRAPHS

THE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS have survived several changes of address. Mother has emptied them from drawers and dumped them haphazardly, with barely a glance and without bothering to sort them out, in a cheap cardboard box covered with plasticized paper. Most of them are still in their sleeves with their negatives, but a number of unidentified photographs, mismatched and of different formats, have been collected in cigar boxes or small travel bags. A photograph signed by Pierre Blanchar, an actor whom my mother was fond of when she was a girl, and two photographs cut out from Cinemonde of a classmate who went on to a very short-lived career as an actress, complete the inventory of the box. The first group of pictures, glued to sheets of punched paper torn from a binder, are dated one by one with blue ink from 1933 to 1947. The majority of these photographs mean nothing to me. Group photos with scalloped edges taken while on vacation or for first communions, they are ordinary photographs in which I don't even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl. A caricature of a teacher and some pictures of a play performed at the lycee Camille-See, where in 1947 my mother once played the role of Esther, are also preserved between these pages.

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146 150 152 153 154 159

• • • * • •

Proof by the Absurd A Memorial for Simple Hearts “T. told me…” Return to the Beloved Image The Cancerous Image Secrets

page 33 selves or the pictures from a photobooth. That’s because prints were expensive then and my parents, people of

page 35 photographed me—…while crying, or bleeding, after an accident, angry, running away?)

page 57 of my face was covered by a doctor’s speculum or a pair of upside down headphones. I had never gone to that particular party, I had never seen this young man. I knew very well that that face could only be my own (or that of my double?) and that at the same time, it couldn’t be me.

and can, in any case, only belong to the man. The photographic history of the family should be abundantly coherent, without gaps. It must leave nothing to chance. This history is repeated without change from one family to another, from one generation to the next-pictures of marriages and births are taken, and we follow the infant as he grows, month by month, year by year, the photograph functioning as a yardstick. Holidays (Christmas, Twelfth Night), dinners, vacations, and one of the most commonly repeated subjects for photography in the forties, fifties, and sixties, the body clothed in a bathing suit, are all recorded. The body is seen as joyous, momentarily free, but still within the family circle, cut offfrom the outside world, without change, without movement. Rarely does a strange face appear in the photographs, one that couldn't be identified later on. The photographs that I must have seen many times as a child do not correspond with my own memories; in spite of their tangible reality, they were unable to create any impressions earlier than those formed by memory (even though they existed before it). This history exists parallel to that of memory. In fact, I have no desire to remember any of those petty scenes when we assembled to have our picture taken-they're dull and much less violent than memory itself In the photographs my body has been incorporated into the family group like it has in its "playpen," it has no history of its own. It's a way of speaking that hasn't been soiled like my memory has: it's not eating my own excrement (I don't remember doing it), but the reprimand that followed; it's a long black-

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page 7 137 • 141 • 143 • 146 • 150 • 152 • 153 * 154 • 159 •

The Photograph, as Close to Death as Possible A Fantasy iv A Cruel Act Proof by the Absurd A Memorial for Simple Hearts “T. told me…” Return to the Beloved Image The Cancerous Image Secrets

page 33 selves or the pictures from a photobooth. That’s because prints were expensive then and my parents, people of

page 35 photographed me—…while crying, or bleeding, after an accident, angry, running away?)

page 57 of my face was covered by a doctor’s speculum or a pair of upside down headphones. I had never gone to that particular party, I had never seen this young man. I knew very well that that face could only be my own (or that of my double?) and that at the same time, it couldn’t be me.

blind, dumb, mutilated. (How are we aware of her father's grief other than by the unusually dark color of the little girls' dresses?) It is said that the purpose of a family photograph is to preserve memory, but it creates images that take the place of memory, conceal it, and are a kind of respectable history, unnuanced and interchangeable, passed from one family to the next with the vague hope of leaving a trace for future generations. Not a literary history, but a superficial history. Nevertheless, these photographs have a different kind of power of reminiscence that is quite indescribable. A certain photograph might immediately bring to mind a memory of heat; I have the impression that my body has been gently burned, that the sand is too hot beneath my feet, and that a bit of shade or the shadows in this photograph can provide relief The photograph of the rocking horse, whose ears my father sawed offin his zealous endeavor to make all our toys harmless, brings back the memory of a gentle feeling of vertigo, a self-induced vertigo, and reveals to me a dimension and an entire network of feelings associated with it that I can no longer have since I am no longer three-and-a-half feet tall. I'm attracted to certain physiques even though I know that I'll be disgusted by what they'll become. For example, those baggy bathing suits that sat high on the waist, that I never wore myself, suggest a preference for bodies that would quickly grow heavy. I also discover, thanks to these photographs, my parents' charm, a characteristic I would never have thought of associating with them-they are young, in some cases younger than me, and I become aware of their smile, their

tanned skin, their slender figures, and find myself desiring them. The photographs furnish me with little information about my own body, useless information that I try to relate to my past. During my early childhood I smile spontaneously; I was what one refers to as a happy baby, my blond hair in a tuft above my head. Then, up until the age of ten, I'm always horsing around in the photographs, or making faces, or sulking, and this reminds me that my father often called me Jeremiah because I always complained and because Saint Herve was born the same day as his colleague, Jeremiah .. .I would like to find some sign in my having put a dress on my stuffed lamb. The group of childhood pictures stops abruptly at the age of puberty, when the body grows hair, becomes sexually mature, adult, almost identifiable. From its inception, the photograph is an attempt at appropriation, a frame for the prepubescent body-just like the home, or not being able to go out at night, or the fact that parents wash a child's body even when he or she is no longer a child. This body has to present itself for the photograph as it would for a medical exam, an available body that the father can scrutinize at any moment. I recall an incident that made a great impression on me when I was 8 or 9 years old. My sister was 12 or 13 at the time, and her breasts were just beginning to develop; high and firm, we had already seen them at the beach the year before, but that was the last time, because the following year they were covered up by a bra. That morning, it must have been a Sunday, my sister was locked in the bathroom.

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My father was at the door, camera in hand, trying to get in. He said, without hiding his intention, that he wanted to photograph his daughter's breasts, because at that age, the moment of their initial formation, they are at the height of their beauty, and if they weren't photographed then, that state of perfection would be lost. That was the extent of his argument. At the time, he sadly renounced his failed attempt at appropriation through the image and fought against that limit; he wanted to push back by a notch the phase of abandonment, of renunciation and, at the same time, extend his role as a father in order to assume that of a lover within the conventions of voyeurism, for between the father and the lover, desire was probably not very different. Looking at all these photographs, I find myself asking, "was my father a good photographer?" But the photographs I like are always the ones that didn't come out well, the ones out of focus or badly framed, or taken by one of the children, and thus unintentionally connected with the vitiated code of a photographic esthetic out of synch with reality. In this way, the pictures of Aunt Cisele, taken with a flash in front of a stone jardiniere, holding between her legs a grimacing baby pulling a small mechanical toy, whose symmetric shadows cross those of the photographer, could be an American photograph by Friedlander. This swaying (I suppose through incompetence) image of port and boat could be a Moholy-Nagy. A portrait of my mother in a chaise longue, young and radiant, her skin quite pale, her head thrown back, could be a Boubat from the 195os; it's not Leila, it'sJeannine, but the feeling is the same. A blurry

self-portrait of my mother in a mirror reminds me of Hitchcock. But these photographic correspondences, though almost professional, don't interest me. I'm looking for a different kind of disorder. Among this mass of photographs I try to find more enigmatic traces. The dedications on the back of the photographs are often banal, they do nothing more than indicate a place and a date (Cambrai,June 14, 1958), a child's age (Claude, 4 months; Claude, 41/2 months), a geographic location ("On top of the Bredent 2,550 meters Mimi"), or a relationship within the family ("From Gisele to her dear sister Jeannine with kisses"). And then, I am suddenly touched by two inscriptions in ink made by my mother, because they are records of death: "DiedJune 20,1938,37 years old," on the back of a photograph of her father Theo, drowned in his car; "DiedJanuary 25, 1950, 18 years old," on the back of a photograph of her cousin Odette, who died in a bicycle accident. These dedications are posthumous, records of premature death (no similar dedication was made on the photographs of those who died in old age), of death stained by fatality, as if the destiny of this family was to die tragically. I see in this my mother's adolescent romanticism, an aspect of her personality that brings me suddenly closer to her. On the back of these photographs appear the marks of the graph paper to which they were glued. I'm extremely disturbed at finding a long, curling strand of red hair, tied with a blue ribbon, in between a sheet of tissue paper that protects a photograph of my father as an infant, ritually naked on an animal skin, and an image of

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his first communion. It's the same strand that can be seen sticking up from the top of his head in the photograph, but something extra has been added to the embalming sacrifice of the photograph by actually cutting it, and it is there, perfectly preserved, just like the day it was cut, soft and silken. I hold it to my nose, but there is no odor of age or decomposition. In my hand it becomes a kind of funereal locket, because I've always known my father to be bald, particularly in photographs of him, and his fear of losing his hair has become my obsession. (I suddenly have an idea for a photograph-have my father hold this locket and let that splendid tuft of hair he's holding look as if it's burning his fingers.) I continue searching through this pile of pictures for some enigma, a photograph that will present a mystery, a resemblance that might open to question some blood relation, a disquieting gesture accidentally traced by the photograph (but such photographs could easily be torn into a thousand pieces), or some unexpected relationship between these individuals that would come into focus and rewrite family history differently than I have known it. I'm tempted, for example, to infer from this history the pederasty that I detect in the mysterious photographs of blond boys-probably my mother's brothers-with fishing poles, half-naked on the bank of a river; or the same boys on horseback, the hands of the taller boy on the smaller one's shoulders, held by a young man in a suit who could be their abductor. Or the little fair-haired boy with a perfect part in his hair, dressed in his Sunday best, in the communion photograph, wearing a white shirt, a long fillet

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extending the length of his bent arm in which he holds a missal, alone on a stone balustrade in front of a dark forest. There seems to be a glaring homosexuality in the photograph of my father lying on the grass with my mother's brother, who has placed one of his hands on my father's shoulder. My father's head is thrown back, and his eyes are closed in an ecstatic smile, but his head touches a shadow projected on the lawn, which must belong to my mother, who took the picture, and these traces of homosexuality are obviously my own projections. In the studio portraits of my grandmother and grandfather, both of which were probably taken on the same day (same backdrop, same lighting, same format, same white border), I try to locate some sign of physical love, since their marriage produced four children, but those shy faces with their high collars and high-buttoned cardigans are devoid of sensuality, and I can at best, and with difficulty, imagine a kind of rudimentary sexuality between them. On the other hand, the association of two similar photobooth portraits--of my mother when she was around 18, and one of her brothers, who must have been 15 or 16---exudes an immediate and violent sexuality, milky and Nordic, like that of a pair of murderous lovers in some tabloid. I am struck by the ghoulish appearance of my greataunt Suzanne in a passport photo taken at Studio Vidal, Rue de Vaugirard. And I am delighted that the ektachrome prints of my sister's wedding have already begun to turn green. Among all these family photographs, the products of unreflexive habit (It's the pretext, the circumstance of the

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photograph, whether a vacation or an official school picture, that is stupid. In order to remember that we were all there together, and before the elements of memory dissipate completely, let's all stand in front of the camera.), there appear, mysteriously, a picture of a crocodile, a picture of cerebral tuberculosis, and, marked in ink with an arrow, a picture of the polar body of a pike parasite (in the form of a crater, where I look in vain for my mother's vulva). And it is these stray photographs that form the sought-for emgma.

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A POSSIBLE PHOTO SEQUENCE FOR BERNARD

F AUCON

My FATHER'S NAME is Serge. He named me Herve Serge. My father showed me the marks on my body that certified that I was his son: the missing bone in the joint of my thumb, maybe my ingrown toenail, all the congenital proofs and slight deformations. My father and mother divided my body along clearly defined lines. In the morning, it belonged to my mother, when she got me out of bed and dressed me, forced me to take a crap and wiped my behind. In the evening it belonged to my father, when he undressed me as I stood on my bed, and put my pajamas on me. He got a ball of cotton and a small bottle of eau de cologne from the bathroom and spread a thick towel over his knees, placing my feet on the towel. Then he began, slowly, to wipe the alcohol-soaked cotton between my toes. He put me to bed and tucked me in, attaching the sheets to the mattress with large metal clips so I wouldn't fall out of bed while sleeping. In the dark he recited an Our Father and a Hail Mary with me; then he kissed me, and I fell asleep. My father ate my snot. He used to hide me beneath his large raincoat to sneak me into R-rated films I wanted to see (Viridiana, Rosemary's Baby, Teorema). Brought up by women, my father never had a father, and his fantasy was to have a son, to put himself in my

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place. My fantasy would then be to play the role of my father, to reenact with a child the ritual of putting him to bed and washing his feet, which my father performed until I was thirteen. My father was bald by then, and I tried to make his hair grow back by rubbing his scalp with rose petals, banana peels and alcohol mixed with mashed chestnuts. I'm growing bald myself, and I don't have a son.

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HOME MOVIES

my sister's birth in 1951 and my own birth in 1955, my father began taking photographs with a secondhand Zeiss Ikon camera he had bought in England when he was 16, and making films with a 16 mm Paillard that his aunt had given him when her husband died. I wanted to find out how a family memory was made, differently constituted in photographs and films, and during an Easter weekend, I returned to my parents' home to sift through the photographs and screen the films. I have vivid memories of watching those films as a child on Sunday afternoons, the projector being set up, the drawn curtains, the sound of the turning reels, the special and slightly warm odor caused by the friction of the film or the oil of the mechanism, the hum of the motor, the noise of the fan. The screening ended with a Chaplin film, invariably The ~iter, and seeing it again I realized that the film made me laugh without my understanding the reasons for my laughter. Yet, I remembered almost every gesture, every scene: the tracking shot of the sanitorium where Uncle Raoul stayed, my parents' marriage, my sister's birth, Uncle Edouard leaving for Madagascar in a prop plane, the horse race at Chantilly, cousin Jean-Claude's marriage ... The family film was made up of a dozen reels of film stuck end to end and stored in tin boxes numbered year by year, on FOLLOWING

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top of a closet. The film followed an unchangeable sequence: marriages, births, maternity (the baby is weighed, diapered, powdered, suckled), holidays, Christmas, Twelfth Night, birthdays, special trips, the bullfight, sailing. My father always began by filming the date, usually shooting from a calendar or using two numbers of a license plate; then he would film the mile markers and road signs along the edge of the highway. And year by year, the places we visited unrolled: Tharon, La Faviere, Luc-sur-Mer, Aiguebelle, Croix-de-Vie, Ie Home-Varaville ... Watching this film gave rise to a melancholy reappraisal; it must have been ten years since the projector had been turned on, but it was probably the last time as well. My mother's anxiety increased-maybe the fear of seeing herself as a young woman-and manifested itself in a senseless and circumspect uneasiness. ("The transformer smells. Stop, we're going to start a fire.") The films were silent, and I was curious to see what subtitles would be provided, what family discourse would graft itself to these images. In picking out phrases here and there that escaped from the descriptive babble, I realized to what extent their conversation was painful, a messenger of death. My transcription follows in the order it occurred: "Robert committed suicide ... " "Edouard had his legs cut off... " "There are a lot of dead people in there ... " "It's Andre .. .look how he's changed ... " "Renee's gotten quite chubby ... " "It was cold and I was frozen stiff. Look at my hair ... " "The trellis was rotting and had to be torn down ... "

"You see, it would be better in color. Look at the flowers. The grass would be green ... " "That's where she had the accident and fell on her face ... " "God, how thin I was, no stomach ... " "I wonder if the films haven't aged. It was much clearer than that..." "He fell in the water and drowned. They found him near the dam ... " '~t least if it was in color the tomato would look like a tomato ... " "That must be the statue of the Virgin at Orteil ... " "Suzanne was in terrible pain here ... " "Maybe it's the last time we'll see these films ... " "That doll never had any clothes ... " "We went swimming. The water was warm ... " "It looks like it was only yesterday, when it's been twenty, thirty years ... " I thought that the same sad discourse, suggesting degradation and loss, would mesh with the photographs of the family as well in a kind of obsessive monologue, even though here, the characters, as a result of their movements, look more alive than in the photographs, and I wondered if this illusory movement contributed to the feeling of sadness, or the feeling that time had been momentarily forgotten. And me? How did I feel, seeing those films again? Certain scenes amazed me allover again, like the one of my grandmother's hands unwrapping a pair of slippers at Christmas, or an old black car with front-wheel drive mov-

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ing through a snowstorm, a woman's delicate hand sticking out of a heavy fur coat and throwing a glass of water out of the car window, the old-fashioned drawing on a calendar, or the flock of sheep blocking the road. (I would like to remove these scenes from the general footage and show them as a separate film, but it would be too short, surreal.) I'm particularly aware of the fact that my gaze, at ten years distance, has become eroticized; on the beach, for example, the scene only becomes interesting when it strays or pans from the members of the family. Leaving church after a marriage, it's the altar boys playing leap frog in the background that catch my eye, and not the wedding procession where I might recognize a passing face. My desire moves toward the characters who enter intrusively into the family group. I examined these films, taken yearly during our vacations and which appear in color in 1960, only to stop completely in 1967 when the children were grown and tired of pretending, trying to determine the evolution of my awareness of my own body among these images. In amazement, I watched myself sucking my mother's veined and swollen breast. Seeing my father at thirty, I said to myself, "if I were to see him like that today I would want to sleep with him." But in spite of my unexpected reaction, only the most insignificant things were revealed to me: "Look, I was still wearing an ID bracelet." "Look what a coward I was already. To get me out of the boat, he had to lift me in his arms above the gangplank." "See, I didn't like the water." '~t the time, I wasn't afraid to do the twist on the beach without a shirt, wearing a Tahitian hat."

My father apologized for the banality of the images. "You'll be disappointed," he said, "they're only home movies." I really didn't expect anything different. In the last films, the scenes of undressing on the beach and diving into the water are repeated with a kind of hysteria, year after year. And behind this futility, still more cruel, is the history of the body's decay. The night of the viewing, from behind the echoing wall of my bedroom, I heard my father speaking quietly, but insistently, to my mother. "When you've put her to bed, come back here for five minutes." And I can imagine how those films acted as a painful stimulant for them, reprojecting the image of their youth for the last time. Aging lovers say to one another: "Our bodies are growing old together, but for me your body has never changed. Your hair has fallen out so slowly that I didn't notice you were going bald; I forgot your magnificent shock of hair, it will always cover your forehead when I look into your eyes. They say our eyes never grow old. I see you at every stage of your life at once. And your stomach isn't that mass of fat flattening against my own, I no longer feel it, and your sex is never limp. And you, your breasts don't sag, or if they do, I love the way they sag. We no longer feel our bodies, they are invisible to us; we secretly love and despise those youthful bodies that pass like ghosts through the projector's luminous brush. We love them so much that, by a kind of inverse magic, we want to enter the image and embrace it, returning with it to the past; we despise them so much that we want to torture them, letting the film burn, motionless before the bulb, a static image we can feed on greedily as

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we destroy it; we despise them so much that we want to disfigure them, mutilate them, scratch them from the film with the point of a needle so they can no longer defy us, these hideous illusions, these too beautiful illusions ... Because you never stopped cheating on me with her, and I've been cheating on you with him. I was wrong about him just as you were wrong about me. Memory isn't scratched out so easily."

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HOLOGRAPHY

I CAN NEVER RECALL exactly Morel's Invention by BioyCasares, so the story I am about to tell may turn out to be a different story. A castaway makes his way to an island cut offby the plague; from afar, he sees a number of conspicuously well-dressed people walking toward a house. He follows them at a distance, watching. He wants to get to know these people before deciding whether to kill them or love them. Among them is a very beautiful woman who keeps somewhat to herself, following the same path every morning. He hides behind trees, jumps along the tops of boulders; just to see her move is a source of pleasure for him. One day, he makes up his mind to approach her, but the woman doesn't see him; he passes right through her, and she moves on. Sea water churned up by turbines in the basement of the house set this strange machinery in motion-Morel's invention. He had contaminated the approaches to the island in order to preserve his immortality. These people were all dead, and during their time on the island, they had allowed their images, their silhouettes, their activities to be captured before committing suicide. Perhaps the capture of their bodies by this multidimensional photography caused their death-no sooner had their flesh formed itself into a projected image than it came off in strips, and their hair and nails fell out. The castaway was a

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helpless spectator as the woman, with whom he had fallen in love, and one of the men embraced. But you can't kill a dead man, and he could do nothing but insinuate himself between them, receiving nothing in return. So he breaks the machinery, and the water enters the house, destroying the film reels and projection lamps, and the figures die a second time. The castaway himself was a character created by Morel, and this apocalypse is only the final act of a spectacle that takes place at every high tide, like a geyser. No, that's not it either. The castaway in turn sets the machinery in motion in order to take his place by the woman in eternity. Each one of his movements are made to correspond to her own, in the hope that one day a spectator will come, who'll say, They loved one another. Holography should be a luxury, like embalming or cryonics-the promise of a ghostly double.

IDENTITY PHOTOGRAPH

I HAD GONE to the police station to pick up a renewal form. I had myself photographed in the color photobooth at the Concorde train station-four different poses. I didn't like the machines where there were only two exposures for four pictures; I never smiled and inadvertently closed my eyes when the flash went off. I found myself in an office at City Hall with the two photographs side by side, two faces that had nothing in common, that belonged to two different people. Separated by ten years. Let's say that everything had taken place within this separation. Validity lasted ten years. On the old, worn card, torn in two and held together with scotch tape, was the face of a child barely twelve years of age. I had the well-groomed head of a little boy and wore a polite smile. My hair was short and straight. My face-my baby face-was photographed in three-quarter profile to avoid getting the flash in my eyes. My blazerthe card had been dated June 22, 1967-my bow tie. A slightly dull-witted face after all. It was June 21, 1977-ten years later. The photographs had been taken the day before and were in color. In this photograph, I was scowling. I still wore a blazer, but my hair was long and curly. I said to myself It all happened during those ten years. Today, I refuse the memory of the past so as not to completely extinguish my desire to go on

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living. Did I even want to remember everything that had happened during those ten years? Everything. Too much. This sinister looking face that I had become? I asked if I could keep the old picture. It was probably the only photograph of me at that age in my possession, with that face, someone else. But the clerk refused. He told me he had to keep the photograph, that he couldn't remove it to give it to me, that it would be filed. Not to appear ridiculous, I didn't insist. I saw my new face stapled to the old ID card, side by side with the earlier face. I noticed that the clerk had put the staple right in the middle of my face. It went in my right cheek and came out near my nose. And there it was, like a sign ...

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IDENTITY PHOTOGRAPH II

I HAD RETURNED HOMElate one afternoon to rest awhile and maybe shower before going out. I had made arrangements to meet a friend who was staying in town at 10 o'clock at the bar at la Coupole. That evening, the heat must have been unbearable, and I must have been very tired, for no sooner was I home than I threw myself on the bed and fell into a deep sleep. I awoke with a start, with the aftertaste of a bad dream. It was daylight when I had fallen asleep. Now, it was already night. The sounds that came in from the open window were no longer the same. Normally, I felt a sense of lightheartedness on these hot summer evenings, when there are people in the streets till late at night. Now, I was simply annoyed, disoriented. I had glanced at my alarm clock and it was 9:45. I had just enough time to put on a jacket, open and shut the door to my studio, take the elevator down, step out to the street and make my way to the bar. As in certain dreams, it seemed that my feet stuck to the asphalt, and that the sidewalk moved in the opposite direction of my steps, but the glances of the people I passed were real enough. Looking at my watch, I hesitated to take a taxi and ended up running down the steps to the subway and sliding the magnetic strip of my monthly pass into the metal opening of the turnstile. Vaugirard-Montparnasse-it was a direct line.

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The train arrived at that moment, and I stepped into the first compartment of the last car. I sat down on one of those folding seats where there is no possibility of anyone's sitting nearby, except directly in front of you. To avoid having to look at the person sitting opposite me, who was black, I sat down facing sideways in my seat. But the scene taking place on the other side of the car drew my attention. A young man with a shaved head withdrew from a black plastic envelope some photographs that were still soft and damp. Mter separating them, he began sticking them, one after the other, on the window next to him, the still damp photographs adhering easily to the glass. He displayed them, seeming to admire the arrangement he gave to this exhibition. I tried to make out the photographs. They were black and white, mostly out of focus and of very poor quality, five by seven inches without a border, interiors and faces, people alone and in groups. I was able to make out an unkempt-looking girl with long hair, and among this grouping were other young men with shaved heads. The young man caricatured their expressions, emphasizing by an exaggerated gesture or by a wrinkle of his eyebrows his joy or his displeasure with the characters in the photographs. They must be his friends, I thought. Other passengers in the car watched the scene as I did, slightly aghast. But as soon as he felt he was being watched, the young man regained his composure and straightened into a stiff, conventional posture, then again resumed his former activity, fully occupied with the exhibition taking shape before his eyes. And suddenly I felt a shock; I couldn't be wrong: slyly, the young man had withdrawn a still limp photograph from his black

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page 35 photographed me—…while crying, or bleeding, after an accident, angry, running away?)

page 57 of my face was covered by a doctor’s speculum or a pair of upside down headphones. I had never gone to that particular party, I had never seen this young man. I knew very well that that face could only be my own (or that of my double?) and that at the same time, it couldn’t be me.

PHOTOBOOTH (Florence)

THE PHOTOBOOTH became my most frequent pastime. The photograph was guaranteed to be indestructible, it would remain unchanged for twenty years. On the machine, I read that the photograph could be used for passports, cards, trade licenses, and gun permits; someone had added "narcissimo." I returned several times to these 400lire photobooths. I didn't know whether the pictures that came out of the machine reinforced my isolation, or if they freed me from it. I went into a store with one of them and ordered my funerary medallion.

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SELF-PORTRAIT

LIKE THE NUDE, the portrait, the still life, and the landscape, the self-portrait is a photographic tradition inherited from the tradition of painting. (Otherwise, we might ask: What is specific to photography, except photojournalism?) Certain photographic self-portraits immediately come to mind: the shadowy profile of a young Kertesz with the big, old-fashioned camera, almost larger than his own face and held at arm's length; the self-portraits as suppliant of the American aristocrat F. Holland Day, who during the last century had himself photographed on a cross, guarded by adolescent centurions, their waists belted with white cloth; the self-portraits in drag of Pierre Molinier, and more recently of Urs Luthi; the sacrificial rites of Dieter Appelt, who has himself photographed nude and hanging by his feet, stretched out in the snow, a cadaver that has already been devoured by worms and briars before reentering the primeval earth. Duane Michals, in his project entitled Changes regroups the photographs of his childhood, year by year, starting with birth, then accelerates the aging process with makeup, photographs himself bent and supported by a cane, and finally programs his own death in 1997, stretched out on a table, a kind of dissecting altar, held around the waist by a young man, also naked and perhaps his adopted son, who attempts to raise him one last time

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before covering him completely in a gray winding cloth, beneath which all we can make out is an inert mound. I like all of these self-portraits very much (an obvious theme for a collection), yet none of them seem to possess the strength of Rembrandt's self-portraits. Is it because a photograph is less forceful than a painting, at once more precise and more superficial? (The photograph, with the exception of the multiple exposure, consists of only a single layer.) I became acquainted with these self-portraits by accident, through postcards. Y had gone to Stockholm for an interview, and she sent me a Rembrandt self-portrait from r630 that shows him as a young man, his longish hair covered by a beret, a ruff appearing under an enormous black garment, his face tense, questioning, somewhat contracted by anxiety. This was followed, five months later, by a self-portrait sent from Munich, where Y had gone to continue the interview, and this self-portrait was like an explosion. It was one of Rembrandt's first self-portraits, maybe his second, and here he appears with curly hair, unkempt, looking like a wild dog, actually more like an idiot, his face in three-quarter profile as if he were turning around, surprised (as if the painter had shouted to himself, saying, Hey you, let's see what you look like!), his mouth open, his face lightly pockmarked, with small dark eyes as round as marbles, and the entire upper portion of his face, his forehead, lost in shadow. There was something mad in this self-portrait, it seemed to emit an uncontrollable violence. I decided to collect Rembrandt's self-portraits, unaware that he had painted nearly fifty of them. From the States-it was Y again-I received another self-portrait

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in old age, imposing and wrinkled, but this time stained with harsh reds (whereas the others were more nearly monochromatic, gray and brown), as if Rembrandt had wanted to paint himself as a mass of flesh, like that carcass of beef hung by its feet attributed to him. These were the only ones that Y sent me, but from M. I took a self-portrait as a young man in armor, head high, conquering; and I went to the Louvre to buy that self-portrait from the end of his life where Rembrandt is dissolved in shadow, a cloth wound round his head, standing next to his easel. I set up the five post cards on a shelf in my library, arranging them in chronological order, and from this juxtaposition, from these abrupt passages, I felt I was learning something about my own existence. I examined them incessantly, as I would a fantastic mirror that could reflect for me all the ages of my life simultaneously. I asked some friends who were leaving for New York to bring back all the Rembrandt self-portraits they could find. They were kind enough to bring me three. A self-portrait of a mature man with a mustache and a mottled complexion, as if it had been painted right after a public revel; a self-portrait as an old man, feeble and sullen; then another self-portrait as an old man, affluent and academic. Not only was I disappointed with these self-portraits, I violently rejected them; they seemed a denial, a senseless doubling of the other selfportraits in my possession, and I tried in vain to incorporate them in the series, to insert them discretely into their continuity. The others rejected them at once. The first five self-portraits I had collected by accident formed a kind of perfect sequence, compact and not interchangeable; men-

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tally, I had already framed them. I didn't like the man in these last three self-portraits, neither the red-faced glutton, nor the frightened old man, nor the comfortable old bourgeois. But I liked the man in the first five-the impetuous youngster full of arrogance, the young man who makes a fool of himself by tousling his hair, the slighdy anxious middle-aged man, the elderly man who chooses to adorn himself with pendants of flesh, and the old man who melts into the coffin's shadow while holding on to the instrument of his creation. I identified with him. I would have wanted my own self-portraits to be like that, and in choosing these, I also chose my own. I tore up almost all the pictures in which I appeared and through this pictorial absence, just as through my rejection of the three Rembrandt self-portraits that I didn't like, I located my own self-portrait, I defined a posthumous image.

THE ALBUM

IN A SMALL cardboard box whose initial contents I no longer remember, I had gathered all the photographs taken of me since my infancy that I hadn't torn up. I rarely looked at them, at least never alone; the act of showing them to someone, to a new friend, was something like a step toward friendship, and also a proo£ At once, I surrendered a body of information about myself (for example, I had changed a great deal physically between the ages of fourteen and eighteen) and at the same time, I was attentive to the reaction of the person to whom I surrendered them, since it could have turned out badly if he mistook my behavior for narcissism. I looked at these photographs by his side, as if I were looking at a stranger-it was no longer me. Besides, the collection had come to a halt not too long ago, when the sensation of aging began. It was more than a means, it was an extension of my own seduction. I looked at the child and the young man in the photographs as someone I wanted to seduce. I shared this desire with my accomplice; the image was an easy prey. The photographs were scattered about, in piles, undated. Finally, I decided to make an album, like they do in families, or rather like an actor's book (but here as the actor of my own life), a bachelor's album. I bought a large, bound album with heavy sheets of black Canson paper and at-

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tached the photographs with paper corners in what seemed to be chronological order. I had the sensation that I was engaging in an unhealthy and funereal undertaking, and I followed the transformations of my face as I would the transformations of a character in a novel who advances slowly toward death.

THE X-RAY

in the flap of a portfolio, I came upon an x-ray of the left side of my torso, taken April 20, 1972, when I was seventeen. I stuck it onto the glass of the French window opposite my desk. The light passed through this bluish network of bony lines and blurry organs as through a piece of stained glass, but by placing this x-ray where anyone could see it (neighbors as well as visitors), I was displaying the most intimate image of myself-much more intimate than any nude, one that contained an enigma, and that a medical student could easily decipher. I no longer keep any pictures of myself at home-it makes my skin crawl when others do-but there, with the pleasure of an exhibitionist, I display the image of a fundamental difference. SEVERAL YEARS AGO,

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I DENTI FICATION

I FIND nothing more annoying than the film strips reproduced on the covers of paperback novels showing the leads from the film adaptation of the book. Gerard Philipe is the most detestable because he is everywhere, in countless manifestations, the one whose face seems most suited to the image of a hero. I want to read The Idiot, I want to read The Red and the Black, but I don't want to be constantly reminded, told by this face (which I find rather engaging, however) each time I pick up a book, "I am Prince Myshkin, I amJulien Sorel, I'm the one, don't forget," when I would prefer (and it's one of the strongest pleasures I get from reading) to create their images slowly from the successive phrases of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal. It's Prince Myshkin and Julien Sorel that I want, and it's possible that at certain times I want them to be me. So, though I risk disfiguring it, I cut off the book's cover, or hide it beneath a neutral, opaque paper on which I can mentally recreate a face or wait until it appears by itself, as if issuing from the developingbath.

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THE HOTEL ROOM

A HOTEL ROOM that can't be photographed (that you have no desire to photograph) is already a bad room. Upon arriving in a city, the first thing to do is to take a picture of the room, as if to stake out a territory, and photograph your reflection in the mirror, as if to mark your temporary belonging, as if to attenuate the cost, as a testimony of your presence. Or you can occupy the room immediately by making love in it.

EXAMPLE OF A TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPH

OUR ARRIVAL in a strange city is accompanied by a feeling of mobility, by a sense of visual excitement and appetite-the joy of an "unfamiliar" gaze (in addition to the light, of course, and the faces, the architecture, the writing on the storefronts, and the advertisements). The day after my arrival, I use up three rolls of film, but it takes me three days to finish the fourth roll. For me a travel photo is a kind of drive, a form of hysteria that quickly dissipates. At the bus station in Krakow, I stopped to take a photograph of an old man and woman covered in blackish rags, their faces overcome by sleep. Their slack bodies, immobile behind an iron bar, were pressed against a staircase, in between the narrow opening separating it from a road map. And there they were, hunched over, exhausted, propped against their metal bar like oversize marionettes in a booth. T. upbraided me for taking the picture, and I found his resistance interesting. Physically, I could have taken the picture since I didn't have to confront the gaze of the man and woman. They were asleep, so the photograph would have had no effect on them, only on those around them, their fellow citizens. T. asked me why I wanted to take the picture, and I argued, wrongly perhaps, that it disturbed me. Yet it wasn't because of its social implications that I was disturbed. He said to me, "That picture has already

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been taken a hundred times, it's only interesting because it's different than where you live," and that seemed both reasonable and unreasonable. Reasonable because it's true that a photograph acquires value only through a displacement in time and space. Unreasonable because his statement was a stupid taunt about my immediate desire that forced me to think: if I think, I can't take the picture. At a restaurant, T. again got annoyed because I took a picture of two waiters who began climbing on chairs to nail up a sign, and I said to him: "Don't you understand that to write this text about photography, I have to be a photographer?" "But you don't even understand what's written on the sign."

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PHOTOGRAPHIC WRITING

WHEN GOETHE wrote in his Italian Journey (1786-88), "I climbed the tower of Saint Mark's, from which one enjoys a unique vantage point. It was about noon, and the sky was so clear that I could see quite far without a telescope. Waves covered the lagoons where two or three galleys and several frigates were anchored. Turning my eyes toward the Lido, I finally caught sight of the sea! A few sails stood out in the distance; to the north and west, the mountains of the Tyrol and those of Padua and Vicenza formed a worthy frame for this magnificent picture," he was creating a form of travel photograph, a postcard. When further on in the same passage about Venice, he describes a convent by Palladio, "From the peristyle, one passes into the large interior court. Only one side of the building that was supposed to enclose it has been completed; this consists of three rows of columns, placed one above the other. On the ground floor is a parvis, on the first floor, an arched gallery leading to the cells, on the second floor, bare walls and windows. Only the bases of the columns and the keystones are made of stone, everything else is brick, but such bricks as I have never seen, made of clay that has first been shaped, then baked and assembled by means of an invisible cement," he first creates a form of architectural photograph, then he isolates a detail, a material nuance, as Renger-

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Patzsch might have done with his close-ups of machinery and buildings. "I spent my day looking, and looking," wrote Goethe in his journal. Isn't this the journalist's credo, his profession of faith? A travel journal is a form of reportage-only the descriptions of the sounds, the voices, the songs, the "atmosphere" that Goethe creates is missing in photography. I've taken these quotes somewhat at random, since any line would exemplify this photographic characteristic. Goethe made "art" photographs when describing the paintings, statues, and relics that he saw during his travels (as did, for example, the Alinari brothers in Florence); he describes faces, he creates portraits, he studies agriculture, food, climate, vegetation, he can describe the texture of a tree ("the fine, tight grain of an olive tree") or a piece of mica as precisely as Weston did. When he arrives in an unfamiliar town, the first thing he does is to climb the highest tower he can find to get a sense of the general panorama, then he climbs down and mixes with the crowd; he takes street scenes, as Arnold Genthe did in San Francisco's Chinatown during the 18gos. He describes festivals, customs, and dress (the Roman carnival) with the same feeling of transience as photography does. Goethe wrote his Italian Journey at the end of his life, from journal notes and letters he sent to his friends; letters and journals being the two forms of writing that most resemble one another. (There is less difference between Kafka's diary and his letters to Otda or Felice than between these letters or his diary and his novels.) They have the same texture, the same photographic immediacy. The

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memory trace is the most recent, and it is barely memorysomething still vibrating on the surface of the retina, an impression, almost a snapshot. It's a kind of crude writing that doesn't respond well to retouching or the work of rewriting. We might think of a journal as a form of contact sheet, an orderly arrangement of images waiting to be developed, but it is not quite that. "I've just reread my journal. I find there are many things in it that could be stated more positively, and yet I don't want to correct it, for these pages are the expression of a first impression, which is always precious since it is the truest," writes Goethe. There is a great deal of difference between a landscape from Goethe's diary and a landscape described in one of his novels, such as Elective Affinities: "Behind them, the village and the chateau could no longer be seen. The lakes spread out below and extended the length of the wooded hilltops beyond; further on, a steep slope defined, vertically and precisely, the last mirror of water, whose surface reflected its imposing forms. Below in the ravine, where a broad stream emptied into the lakes, was a partly hidden mill that, together with the setting, looked like an agreeable resting place. Throughout the semicircle before us was a varied arrangement of heights and depths, meadows and woods, where the first signs of green promised the great abundance yet to come. In several areas, isolated clusters of trees drew one's attention. At the viewers' feet, in fact, a grove of poplars and plane trees stood out handsomely right along the banks of the most central lake. They were in full flower, fresh, healthy, pushing upward as they spread outward."

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The journal landscape is a kind of quick, staccato sketch-a postcard. The landscape in the novel has the advantage of a longer exposure-it is almost a painting compared to the photographic landscape of the diary. The description in the novel, which claims to be of a particular landscape, must be an imaginary mountain, baroque, apocryphal, the memory of many landscapes. It is almost tedious, while the journal description is dynamic. In the same way, there are brief notes in Kafka's diaries that are pure photography: "Main street, empty tramways, pyramids of cuffs in the window of a store selling Italian imports." ('1\ triptych," S. exclaimed with ridicule.) ''An old town; a man in a blue shirt clumsily descends a steep, narrow street. Staircases." (Except for the addition of color, we might think we are looking at a Cartier-Bresson from the thirties.) "Woman with black hair, serious, her mouth drawn; she is seated in the hall." '1\ child framed by a window, behind the passage leading to the urinal. Pleasant sensation at the sight of a lizard on a wall. Psyche with flowing hair. Soldiers passing on bicycles and hotel employees dressed as sailors ... " Kafka's diary, from 1910 to 1923, the year before his death, develops by a process of contraction, of rarefaction-the final entries are the shortest, sometimes no more than a single word ("The Call," "Hopes?" "Letter," "Syncopation"), like snapshots of his inner being, exposing his suffering almost the way x-rays exposed the dark spot on his lungs. The last descriptive notes are a little like the mental images of a paralysed man, whose visual sense continues to perceive small differences in light, limited movements in an immediate visual field.

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Peter Handke, in the journal he kept from 1975 to 1977 (like the photographs, the journal is dated), records sensations, ordinary gestures, odors, every form of minor disorder. He puts his daily life into writing as he lives it: the transcription is almost immediate, but it is also continuous, something more than photography. We might think of it as a video camera doubling his sight and his conscience with a long, uninterrupted spool of film, from which he later gathers a few scraps.

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CONTACT SHEET

the notable disasters that arise from improper settings, incorrect focal lengths, or faulty exposures, the first impulse, the first reflex is one of disappointment: Is that all I saw on these small 35-millimeter rectangles that often cease to have meaning for me? Is this the result of all that tension and gesticulation? The pictures I thought would turn out the best are failures, and those I considered the least promising are often quite good. The camera has gotten the best of me. Once again, it is not equal to my abilities, giving either more or less than what I expected of it. Either I'm a bad technician or it's a bad mediator.

WITHOUT MENTIONING

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THE INSULT

THERE ARE some people, when passed on the street, for whom a single glance seems to be an insult; the photograph then becomes a superinsult, the ultimate insult. This would define the stature, the physique (and the myth) of the street photographer, the reporter: a bruiser, a brute, someone who can stand up to the insult hurled back at him, heavy and awkward, blind, desensitized.

THE CAMERA

THE CAMERA, with its diaphragm, its shutter speeds, its carcasslike case is really a small, autonomous being. But it is a mutilated being that we have to carry around with us like an infant. It is heavy, noticeable, and we love it the same way we do an infirm child who will never walk alone, but whose infirmity enables him to see the world with an acuity touched with madness. "Why do you take pictures with that ridiculous little camera? All right, it's not an Instamatic, but it doesn't look too serious. You could buy yourself a Leica." "Look, I didn't pick this camera, but it suits me. It's not heavy, it fits in my pocket, and I can go to places where it's not considered appropriate to take photographs. But I especially like it because it doesn't look serious, as you say. It doesn't establish any serious, professional, profitable relationship when I photograph people. It doesn't dictate to them." "You mean it exploits them even more?" "Maybe you're right. But I don't know how to explain it to you. For me it's a question of decency, of morality. I'm disgusted by those big cameras arrogantly planted on what are often potbellied stomachs. They make me think of the cotton or felt padding that dancers put in their leotards. And then, having a big camera is also a way of flashing our

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money, our purchasing power, and then shoving it in someone's face the way-to use a vulgar expression-we shove it up someone's ass. It annoys me to see photographers walk around poor neighborhoods with that glittering device around their neck, like some marvelous jewel." "In any event, you're not the one to remind us of our guilty social conscience. Remember, there are people who have nothing going for them but technique and who dissimulate their shortcoming as if it were a physical defect. Sometimes they are the most humble."

THE FETISH

DURING THE NIGHT of January 6-7,1980, while returning to Hamburg on the Paris-Vienna express, between Strasbourg and Paris, F. struggled to keep awake. A man in a raincoat had just sat down opposite him. The man had no luggage, and they were alone in the compartment. F. was thinking about his camera, an extremely rare camera, a Robot Royal 36 that some bizarre character had given him the summer before when he was delivering car parts and work clothes in the region around Hamburg. F. thought that if he fell asleep, the man in the raincoat might take his camera, so he kept it tucked under his arm, beneath his wool-lined leather jacket, resisting, until sleep took him. He dozed off in a state of anxiety. When he awoke, the man in the raincoat was no longer sitting opposite him, and there was a terrifying emptiness between his arm and his side. The Robot Royal was gone. He ran up and down the train, but the man in the raincoat was already faceless; he couldn't even remember whether he was clean-shaven or not. When the train arrived, he filed a complaint and signed a statement attesting to the theft. He recited the camera's serial number, which he knew by heart, six numbers engraved in the box's black felt-I 83053. He swore to himself that one day he would find that camera. Mter the theft, he was unable to take a single photograph. A friend

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told him that because of customs regulations, stolen cameras end up in secondhand shops in Brussels or Amsterdam, so F. painted his replacement camera with indelible blue ink and went to Brussels to find his Robot Royal. He took a night train, sitting with Portuguese travelers returning to the Netherlands. The trip took six hours, whereas normally it only takes three, but F. likes to arrive at dawn, when a city is just waking up and when the nightshift orders a final half stein of beer before going to bed. There was a strong wind, and it was cold, in spite of the fact that they were well into spring. In the cafe opposite the Care du Midi, a woman with eyelids swollen from lack of sleep gently caressed her man's hair with the bright red tips of her fingers. The juke box wasn't working. All day long, F. walked around the city streets; he entered all the secondhand camera shops; he asked the salesmen if they had seen a Robot Royal 36. He still believed he would be able to find it. He believed he would. In Brussels, he took only one photograph with the blue camera: a painted cross on top of a wall along the edge of the highway. He didn't go to bed and left that evenmg.

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THE THREAT

THE THREAT always comes from the same window, from that same window where every Saturday and Sunday without fail he watches me while listening to a small radio. Now it's morning, and the man should be at work, but the window opens suddenly, revealing a kind of red flounce (I don't know how to define it: a plane, a snail, a hedgehog? They are all quite different and yet seem to describe this object.) with a cord attached on the bottom, and it begins to pivot, like a radio-controlled toy, against the glass. Suddenly, a hand attaches itself to the left side of the glass to hold it in place during this operation. I can't see a face, and I find this apparition genuinely terrifYing, although from the other side of the glass, it must seem quite ordinary. The same might be said about photography, about the rift, the schism between the world and its representation: what I was seeing from my window, as a result of the distance and the angle that rendered all those gestures unreal by obscuring the individual who was making them, was a kind of photograph. On the other side, on the side of reality (the side of action, not sight), there was only a woman cleaning the windowpanes. Now, every time he returns from work, after having kissed his wife and children, the man walks out onto the balcony . for a split second to make sure I'm really there and smiles at me. But this is no longer a photograph, it's a novel.

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A FANTASY II

THE seE N E takes place in one of the demonstration rooms for static electricity in the Hall of Inventions in Paris. A scientist, a bald man in a white smock, wearing small, round, wire-rimmed glasses, is enclosed in a metal grillwork cage, occupied with the switches and levers of a control panel that sends bolts of lightning across sparking and sputtering tubes. A rotor conducts the static electricity to a circular metal pedestal where a naked young man is standing, chosen for his size and the consistency of his hair, which is very dry and which suddenly forms a bristling, vibrating crown around his forehead. Even his skin and the whites of his eyes are drawn upward. He has been carefully instructed not to remove his socks, which fall around his ankles, protecting him from the too cold metal, from its invisible incandescence. (The nylon in his socks is an excellent electrical conductor, even better than horn or hoof.) Then, one of the scientist's assistants gives the young man a small, steel wand. He gives an identical wand to another boy of the same age, this one fully clothed, indicating that they should point their wands at one another as if they were weapons. At once, the electricity bursts forth in sparks, weaving a slender, spasmodic, blue filament that slowly passes back and forth between the two bodies. The scientist is really a prisoner in his cage.

"The majority of your stories ooze homosexuality." "How could it be otherwise? It's not that I want to hide it, or that I want to boast about it arrogantly. But it's the least I can do to be sincere. How can you speak of photography without speaking of desire? If I mask my desire, if I deprive it of its gender, if I leave it vague, as others have done more or less cleverly, I would feel as if I were weakening my stories, or writing carelessly. It's not even a matter of courage (I'm not militant), it has to do with the truth of writing. I don't know how to say it more simply. The image is the essence of desire and if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory."

DIFFRACTION

T. brought my attention to the fact that in posing for B. F., who works with a Hasselblad, he felt that the photographer's gaze was less coercive, because of the deflection involved in the use of the 21/4 by 21/4 camera, where the photographer looks down with his head bent over the viewfinder in an attitude similar to contemplation (or even prayer). His gaze ricochets off a series of mirrors toward his model; a form of desire has replaced the predatory nature, the directional brutality of the 35 millimeter camera. T. compares this gaze to the equally deflected gaze that is passed from one window to another-in the subway for example-when cruising someone. Filtered through its reflection, the gaze loses some of its brutality, gains in impunity ("What? I never looked at you! You're dreaming. I was looking out the window.") and especially gains in complicity, in perversity. We alone can intercept the gaze that we exchange indirectly through a reflection. The consent in our gaze is our secret alone, a mirage suspended in air that will soon disappear. And we'll leave the train by different doors, this time without so much as a glance, as if nothing had happened, as if we hadn't even seen one another.

page 85 act of taking photographs? We covet an object—the stake is insignificant—we miss our shot or hit the bull’s-eye, the

page 90 Île Saint-Louis, my attention was drawn to a scene I would have liked to photograph: a tall boy with tousled hair who

page 96 distinction between them is fascinating: the censored image is more erotic than a nude, the pornographic image

PREMEDITATION

at the office, a young mail clerk spoke to me for the first time in the two years that we've been passing one another in the halls. He spoke softly, in a voice that was both shy and determined, as if the result of his proposal was completely indifferent to him. Blushing slightly, he told me that he would like to take a picture of me, that he had already found a suitable location, a location to which he attached several adjectives, including weatherbeaten; he qualified the light in the place-which he referred to as "illumination"-as being diffuse. He was talking about the entrance to a building that was being demolished. He wanted to do the portrait in the studio, then superimpose it, through a double exposure or collage, I'm not sure how, on this run-down building. He then specified precisely what clothes he would like me to wear. He said, "What I especially like are your black leather jacket and your gray pants," adding, "very pale, like you are now, and looking withdrawn." I'm amazed at the specificity of his request and hastily accept. To hide my surprise, I opened an envelope as if I were in a hurry. The fact is that this inconspicuous young man has been watching me very carefully when he crosses me in the hall ....

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON

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THE SESSION

THE PHOTOGRAPHER D.S., whom I barely know, but whose previous exhibition I liked, asked to do my portrait. He made a date to meet one morning in someone else's apartment on the Champ-de-Mars. He arrived late, his bag in his hand. I was waiting at the door. He said to me, "It will only take thirty minutes, we have time to go to the cafe for a cup of coffee." In the cafe, he said to me, "I'm going to do your portrait, but I want you to swear something to me first. I have a method for taking portraits, it's very simple, but it has to remain a secret. I'm counting on you never to reveal it." Once in the apartment, he takes from his bag a sheet of black satin, which he unfolds, taping it to a wall where the light falls perpendicularly. He has me stretch out on this improvised sofa, feeling quite stiff in my clothes, which I didn't want to remove. He attempts to free my forehead and eyebrows by brushing back my hair, but I protest and am suddenly enclosed in a black satin straigh~acket up to my neck, wrapped in a winding cloth, like a recumbent figure with upturned eyes. Light also falls from above, from a skylight through which I can see the Eiffel Tower, and suddenly, without sobbing or shaking, my unobstructed gaze and that light, too gray, too bright, release an incessant flood of tears that bathe my face. It's as if the light

that is penetrating me so completely through my eyes is cleansing me, entering while violating a sanctuary accustomed to darkness. The photographer circles around me; bending over me, he does not speak. I no longer control my face or my expression, they no longer belong to me. I say to myself, I'm like a child being tortured. In this position, I am much more uncomfortable than when I'm at the dentist's with my neck bent back, the ceiling of light shining in my eyes and all that metal in my mouth and under my tongue. The camera prepares to sever my head with blades of shadow and present it-as if to Salome-not on a gold platter, but on a sheet of photographic paper. My hands should flutter around me gently and break at the wrists to resemble the hands of a corpse or a wax mannequm. At a given moment, the photographer looks at his watch and says, "That's it, the thirty minutes are up." The operation is over. I get up, exhausted, spent, as after some great physical exertion, empty, yet full of hatred for the photographer. I ask where the shower is, I want to wash this session offme, put a visor of hair over my eyes. On separating, we exchange words. I tell the photographer that if one day I have to write an article about him, I'll do it in the form of a kitchen recipe. When I tell T. about the session, he reproaches me for allowing myself to be reduced to such a state of transparency and tears in front of someone I hardly know, while if he had tried to do the same, within the context of our familiarity, I would almost certainly have refused. But the images that resulted from this session are completely outside me, like masks, like a morphological record.

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ADVICE

A YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHER shows his work: pictures of gratings, crosswalks, curbs, textures, grids, faultless exercises in graphics that seem to repeat all of recent American photography. What can we say about it? Mention the quality of the prints? The precision of the framing? What can we do not to appear inattentive? Look at the photographs twice, go through them again slowly while we feel the other's presence near us, tense, pretending to be looking somewhere else? And then, why can't we say that we have nothing to say, that this work elicits nothing in us but a dreary impression of quality? "You should photograph the people you love with the same precision as you photograph your gratings." That's what we should say. Another young photographer recounts his disappointment. He had traveled along the canals to do a story on the people who navigate the barges, and he returned without a single photograph, without a single "good photograph." He related how "I have no problem with people, everything's fine as long as I'm talking with them. But as soon as they become the subject of a photograph, I lose interest in them. I become interested in the photograph, and they sense it and become withdrawn, and the photograph is bad." "Photograph only those closest to you, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your lover. The emotional antecedent will carry the picture along with it ... "

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page 85 act of taking photographs? We covet an object—the stake is insignificant—we miss our shot or hit the bull’s-eye, the

page 90 Île Saint-Louis, my attention was drawn to a scene I would have liked to photograph: a tall boy with tousled hair who

page 96 distinction between them is fascinating: the censored image is more erotic than a nude, the pornographic image becomes erotic.

page 103 defines a succession of exteriors, is a readymade frame. The red light that stops the machine is like a shutter. The

page 104 immanent respect among the passengers is such that you would have to run like a thief after the first photograph

page 123 in short, a kind of putsch. But this explanation was inadequate. I must have been on my guard.

SUITE, SERIES, SEQUENCE

SOME YOUNG DIRECTORS of photography at the cultural center in N. are planning an exhibition on the theme "Suite, Series, Sequence." The sequence would form a continuous narrative, similar to a series of film stills; the series would involve the exploitation, the exhaustion, of a single idea, a single object; the suite could be a "divisible" montage of several photographs that relate something other than themselves once they've been hung, like a message or a visual charade. While at Bayreuth, in the summer of 1978, I had an idea for a photographic suite that would juxtapose the three types of images, displayed in windows and on posters, that struck me the most forcefully: The posters of young terrorists framed in black and white, with whom sums of money-a bounty-are associated, found in banks and post offices. They are progressively terminated by ticking them off with an X, like a marksman's scorecard. In the windows of art galleries, the pictures signed by the stars who sang Wagner at Bayreuth, similar to the ones on the walls of tourist inns. In the windows of drugstores, a terrifying, hyperrealistic drawing of allergy symptoms. It shows pink flesh covered with lesions or fungus, small pockets of acne and greenish pustules, dripping mucus, swollen eyes. But what would such a montage supply except a gratuitous message, a spasm of anguish engendered by images, an enigmatic parable of violence?

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PORNOGRAPHY

I BOUGHT a pornographic magazine in the hope of falling in love with an image for real (the idea already excites me as a fictional conceit). I had seen his face, his body, his sex, in a catalog and I bought the issue, Dinamo 5, where this same body, alone, is multiplied from one page to another, always nude and looking into the lens, once, maybe, with an erection and contorting himself to lick the tip of his penis. The young man is the same as the one in the catalog (here he's called Johnny Harden), but suddenly I no longer like him. I paid 100 francs for him, and he hardly excites me enough to give me a hard-on, even once. Yet, I like everything about this young man: his face (his small, stubborn face, as Genet, whom I'm now reading, would say), his prepubescent body that must have needed very little shaving and powdering, his sex, which is heavy and well formed, even the clothes that were chosen for the picture-the sweatshirt that opens over his torso and the headband encircling his hair, the undershirt pulled up over his nipples or down over his belly, revealing the outline of his sex beneath. But suddenly, the effect is gone. The image, so often repeated, creates a more intense image of him, and I can no longer project anything onto his body, except my lips around his penis, my palms across the breadth of his shoulders, his chest, his buttocks. It's an im-

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age I can't degrade and against which my fantasies literally collide. So I try to find more realistic details on his body, like this small, badly concealed wart on one of his toes, or even this onset of baldness that can be seen as he leaves the water, with his hair pulled back. The image is worn and completely static, a dead, frustrating image, one that soon leaves me indifferent.

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PORNO BIS

ORDINARILY, we make the following distinction between an erotic photo and a pornographic one: The erotic photo is the nude in repose, amorphous, academic (the nude of the painting studio and sculpture gallery), it is rather the suggestion, the dissimulation of pornography. The pornographic is the dynamic and debauched nude, coarse, insensitive, hot-blooded. The erotic photograph is in black and white; the pornographic takes on color (as we say of an infant's cheeks when the child has been outside-it's the rush of blood to the penis that causes an erection), with pink predominating; and the participants' hair is always damp. The erotic photograph is clean and noble, the pornographic, dirty and trivial. The erotic photograph is often expensive, it is printed on good paper, it can be displayed, hung without shame. The pornographic photograph is printed on glossy paper that creates reflections; we hide it, use it, and then throw it away; we mishandle it, soil it. A model for an erotic photograph must be beautiful, the lighting should be suitable. The subject for pornography can easily be imperfect, paunchy, he's only one element in a carnal mechanism, a face, a model in a catalog. His is a cut-rate body (a discounted body, the body shown in a magazine is always less expensive than the one in a brothel). But the boundary between the erotic and the porno-

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graphic is more problematic; it has to do with commerce. Pornography can be made to pass for eroticism, rarely the opposite, there would be no profit in it. The pornographic is that which is not touched by art (or grace). Many pictures of nudes are sold for the body they represent rather than for the photograph itsel£ They are sold under the pretext and the protection of art. The erotic photograph can be framed, the pornographic comes wrapped in cellophane, like meat in the supermarket. The body in an erotic photograph can be manipulatedwe can take it by the hand and lead it toward pornography, toward its own pornography. We can fantasize: Here's what I would like to do with this body, this is what I would like to touch, this is what I want to submit it to, what I want it to submit me to. This body is open, possible, an ill-defined body. The body in pornography is held in check, it is hyperrealistic, swollen, and saturated. I can't seem to satisfy myself with the pornographic body. With it, my orgasms are rapid and unsatisfactory; he ejaculates for me. The erotic body is easily handled. I can manipulate it as I please, I can turn it over, I can make it articulate something other than its text, I can bend it in two, and it never tires, it detaches itself from the paper to fill my head, I can lead it where I want, it does everything I tell it to. The pornographic body only does what it wants, or what some mindless director wanted it to do. So, I'm furious at discovering my fantasies in pornographic magazines. It means that they have been registered and prescribed in advance, and probably for centuries. All I do is reproduce them. I can't escape the conformity of pleasure.

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page 85 act of taking photographs? We covet an object—the stake is insignificant—we miss our shot or hit the bull’s-eye, the

page 90 Île Saint-Louis, my attention was drawn to a scene I would have liked to photograph: a tall boy with tousled hair who

page 96 distinction between them is fascinating: the censored image is more erotic than a nude, the pornographic image becomes erotic.

page 103 defines a succession of exteriors, is a readymade frame. The red light that stops the machine is like a shutter. The

page 104 immanent respect among the passengers is such that you would have to run like a thief after the first photograph

THE COLLECTION

P.'s COLLECTION is unframed and does not hang on a wall. There's nothing improper about it really, but it remains hidden. P. is probably afraid he might grow tired of the items in his collection. He displays them occasionally, clandestinely, and immediately puts them away. He wouldn't be pleased if the cleaning woman were to find them and, following Poe's example in "The Purloined Letter," he feels it's better to display openly before everyone an object we wish to conceal and make invisible, rather than secreting it away mysteriously and thus inviting the curious to find its hiding place. So P"s photographs are stored carelessly; they are kept in plastic bags from the supermarket that are strewn around his apartment, leaning against the baseboards. Sometimes P. takes a photograph from its envelope and attaches it to the wall-for a few moments only and for him alone-with small metal clips that don't bite into the paper. He likes to pass his fingers over some of the surfaces of this miniature body, as one might do with a pantograph, but it would be stupid to reduce this passion to a few fussy gestures. P"s collection actually consists of two distinct collections: One collection is made up of purchases. (He's willing to spend up to I ,500 francs providing that a face pleases him.) But these faces are anonymous, they are like ghosts from

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whom he expects nothing, except a fleeting and ornamental excitement. The objects in the second collection are his prey, they are initially alive, before being laid out on the paper and dipped into the baths of acid. Like Weegee, P. generally works from a car. He spends a long time flushing out his quarry, driving around for hours; he tracks them down, shadows them as soon as their gait, a strand of hair, or a blue sweater has set this visual mechanism in motion. The subject is not immediately confronted-he follows him to his home, finds out when he comes and goes, who he sees. He becomes a subject for a file. Mter this, P"s entire effort consists in transplanting him to a predetermined location where he will occupy the exact spot as his predecessors and his successors-an excursion boat, strange as it seems, where he has been invited to dinner-and where he will be brutally consumed by an apparently idiotic and unpremeditated image. The photographer on board is the unwitting accomplice; he takes the picture-always the same--of the collector and his model. The collector buys the photograph at the bottom of the gangplank, and it will go into the plastic bag, with its file, an age, the initials of a name. P. recently expanded his collection through the purchase of a video camera, but he can't bear to see his models again once they've been put on film. The well known American John Gacy, who disguised himself as a clown and murdered twenty-five teenagers, proceeded in very much the same way when he handcuffed his victims-at first it was a game-before laying them out in his basement. P"s collection is really a secret little cemetery, but a photograph is a

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less violent means of taking possession of someone than a crime. ryle could say that it is the condition of P's pardon. Have mercy on him.)

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THE FOVEA

I READ in a science magazine that the area of sharp vision is restricted to a small depression of the macula lutea in the center of the retina called the fovea. Projected in space by the mechanism of sight, it would correspond in size to the fingernail of our index finger if we extended our arm horizontally in front of us. So sight, when it is acute, would be limited to the surface of a fingernail moving through space, an activity similar to touching, one that would recreate the image of reality, touch by touch, facet by facet, like a puzzle, each piece of which would have the same dimension and the same form as the fingernail of our index finger. (Nearsighted people would be considered mutilated.) The fovea would only be a point, a center of precision within a blurred circle of vision, which would itself form an indistinct tableau stained with color, like staring into space. But this tableau might itself be nothing else than the memory of what the fovea registered earlier, a stationary image that continued to vibrate slightly, that remained suspended a while before completely disintegrating, covered by another pattern of acute or obscure vision in the dream image. Each phase of the fovea's activity would be followed by a period of repose, when the image is digested: from time to time, the fovea would take a vacation, it would be

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prevented from focusing on anything at all, it would rock back and forth in reflection or sleep. Sometimes, the fovea would pass repeatedly over the same surface to let the tactile sensation of its fingernail wander tirelessly across the same image, the same face, the same body, the same painting: the subject is in love, or obsessed. But when he looks at a photograph, he compels his fovea-by this more or less reduced (or enlarged) and fragmentary demarcation-to act the way the eye does in a state of desire or, rather, obsession, through his continued scrutiny. He sees nothing but this image, detached from the absolutely fluid bounds of context and reality; and he sees too, too often, the same unreal pigments on the paper. The photographic gaze is a visual fetish-a second fovea within the fovea, a deformed child, a tiny abyss, a superconcentrated fovea (too rich, too sweet, too bitter). As a result, a different type of activity (and different tastes) would come into play for large or small formats, exhibitions or books, the projected or printed image. As the image increases in size, the intensity of the act is both diminished and regenerated-the surface to be encompassed by the tip of the fovea-fingernail increases, the light ray must spread out rather than converge, and loss is inevitable. Even if the image stands alone on a white screen in a mass of darkness, the fovea encounters all kinds of parasites-not just fireflies-capable of distracting it along its path; its activity becomes public. So looking at a small picture or an image in a book is a form of activity that is more secret, more solitary, and more perverse than this, and not simply because of the proximity of the object. It is the same as

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looking into someone's eyes from half an inch away, or at a mouth just before kissing it; it's a "surreptitious" way of looking, like looking at a banned image, or through a keyhole, or in the false bottom of a trunk, or the hollow of a cameo. We look in much the same way as we desire, or as we fantasize-by obsessive scrutiny.

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page 90 Île Saint-Louis, my attention was drawn to a scene I would have liked to photograph: a tall boy with tousled hair who

page 96 distinction between them is fascinating: the censored image is more erotic than a nude, the pornographic image becomes erotic.

page 103 defines a succession of exteriors, is a readymade frame. The red light that stops the machine is like a shutter. The

page 104 immanent respect among the passengers is such that you would have to run like a thief after the first photograph

page 123 in short, a kind of putsch. But this explanation was inadequate. I must have been on my guard.

page 85 act of taking photographs? We covet an object—the stake is insignificant—we miss our shot or hit the bull’s-eye, the

page 90 Île Saint-Louis, my attention was drawn to a scene I would have liked to photograph: a tall boy with tousled hair who

page 96 distinction between them is fascinating: the censored image is more erotic than a nude, the pornographic image becomes erotic.

page 103 defines a succession of exteriors, is a readymade frame. The red light that stops the machine is like a shutter. The

page 104 immanent respect among the passengers is such that you would have to run like a thief after the first photograph

page 123 in short, a kind of putsch. But this explanation was inadequate. I must have been on my guard.

DANCE

AJAPANESE DANCER from the SankaiJukugroup dances with a peacock. His entire body is very white, powdered with white clay, and his head is shaved. He wears nothing but a plain linen loincloth tied around his waist and stands out in relief against a wooden backdrop to which varnished fishtails and enormous fins from some cetacean have been attached. He embraces the peacock like a woman in a swoon, and the pattern on the bird's plumage extends his loincloth with a gold-flecked train. We can see that the p~acock's thighs and feet are very muscular, like an ostrich, but the dancer keeps them bent, broken at the joints, and immobilized in his left hand, pressed against his side. His right hand encircles the peacock's neck, stretches it, plays with it as if it were a delicate instrument, squeezes it almost to the point of strangling it. Everything is limited to a few contractions, and to the flow of blood, which he must feel and control with his palm: the Japanese dances a kind of slow-motion tango with the peacock, he dances with the peacock's fear, with its vital fear of death. It really is an extraordinary moment, one of great tension, great beauty. But when the dancer releases the terrified peacock, we no longer know where to look, and our eye, which wanders between the dancer and the bird, loses its orientation. The peacock is nothing but a big terrified fowl who scratches

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around stupidly and snares itself in the cord that restrains its feet. The dancer is nothing but a dancer gesturing slowly. Our fascination has worn off, and rather than be deceived, we prefer to divert our gaze to the empty space between them, where the magic was created, the site of a latent photograph. Moreover, when the SankaiJuku group came to Paris, many people, many photographers, returned to the performance with their cameras mounted on tripods. They bought seats in the first row and waited for the appearance of the peacock. They fired away-they were guaranteed beauty. That eminently photographic image, however, doesn't belong to them (what is it that eludes photography here, except the infinitesimal movements of contraction of the peacock's neck, which are essential to the dance?), it belongs to the dancer, and he has decided that this will be a dance and not a photograph. And we might reiterate that beauty, like theater, is tied to the ephemeral, and to loss, and can't be captured. Only I would prefer that photographers put more dance (or theater, or cinema) into their pictures, just as the dancer had put photography into his dance.

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POLAROID

POLAROID is a trademark, like Coca-Cola. The success of a product of this kind is based on a sense of mystery: the object must be magical, it must surprise us, never completely reveal its secret. It took a long time to discover exactly what went into Coca-Cola, the dark, bubbly liquid that not only momentarily quenches thirst, but also gives a discrete lift to the body: caramel, caffeine, some even said cocaine. When Dr. Land presented his project for an instantly developing film to the Optical Society of America in 1947, he was correct in saying, "The process must be concealed from-non-existent for-the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in making photographs." Polaroid was launched on the market as a new gadget from the photographic industry. Its mechanism was somewhat extravagant, utilizing a bellows like an old camera, but it was smaller and went "bzz ... bzz ... ," and you had to pull the tab, shake it for a while, look at your watch, and pay careful attention, when removing the film from its developing sleeve, not to get any of the chemical jelly on your fingers. The pictures weren't very good, but it was fun to operate. It was expensive as well, but you didn't have to wait, any reality could be handed back to you at once, in reduced form. Polaroid was initially marketed as a child's

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toy, though it was an instrument for pornography: it freed the amateur from the constraint of the laboratory. It provided a free image, which no longer had to pass before the gaze or the censure of an outsider. It freed the amateur from his paranoia. Polaroid's goal was to perfect the process, through the introduction of color and then, with the arrival of the 8x-7o, it greatly simplified handling in order to enlarge the market and reach other consumers. It was necessary to abandon the gadget aspect, the technology, whose familiarity had dulled the imagination, to confront and assimilate another fantasy: art, to make art with this simplistic technology. But since traditional photography also made art, it was necessary to show that Polaroid made its own art, that there was a Polaroid art distinct from art photography, even though the colors came out the same, even though the format was limited (until the recent arrival of 2 by 3 inch Polaroid film). Polaroid cameras were given to the defenders of art photography: Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Andre Kertesz, Duane Michals, Helmut Newton, Ralph Gibson, as well as painters, Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton. They were asked for the use of their names and to "show them that you can do as well with this camera as with your regular camera, or better yet, show them that you can do something different with it, but don't give up your idiosyncrasies or you won't be recognized." Walker Evans, who photographed facades almost his entire life, photographed a final facade of a house. Helmut Newton photographed a woman's legs planted in black patent-leather shoes; Duane Michals, the back of a man stretching. Each one followed

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his own fantasies, repeated his own mannerisms. It was also suggested that the photographers work on themes, the self-portrait for example, since the Polaroid lent itself well to this solitary activity-there were no witnesses, and one had total control over the image and over what one wanted to leave behind as image. Generally, Polaroids are discarded, you find lots of them, half crumpled, in the gutter. No negative, no trace, no proof. On the other hand, it is often impossible to redo a photograph that doesn't succeed, because we don't know it didn't succeed until one or two days later on the contact sheet, once the tension and the desire to make the photograph have slackened. With the Polaroid, the photographer can correct himself on the spot, until he is satisfied-the Polaroid can serve as a sketch. With the arrival of the less manageable 2 by 3 inch format, Polaroid began to approximate so-called normal photographs by improving the accuracy of its colors, for until then, it had produced images that were slightly adulterated and out of sync with reality. Its colors were simultaneously garish and dull, as if filtered through a dream or a half-tone screen. Rudiger Vogler, the hero of Wim Wender's films, often made Polaroids (or photobooth pictures) during his spare time, during his wanderings, as if to double his solitude with a trace, in order to detach himself from it and also to increase the distance separating him from the world, by enclosing it within a box, and spitting it out in the form of derisive vignettes, like chopped meat out of a grinder. Polaroid, like photography before it, wants to achieve the status of art, and is within its rights in doing so: art can

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be made from almost anything, pieces of string, a hand resting on top of a wall. But the beauty and force of this material do not reside here, they reside in the fact that it is something that has been disgorged, something hurried and fragile, and in its anguished race for immediacy, its backing away from time. Andre Kertesz, who is now eighty-five years old and lives in New York, can no longer go out in the street with his camera-it would immediately be stolen. And his hands shake. He started taking photographs from his window with a telephoto lens and a camera mounted on a tripod. Now, he stays in his apartment and takes Polaroids of the light's intrusion into small glass objects, birds sitting on his window sill. And if he uses Polaroid film, it's because he has arrived at an age when he can no longer wait for his film to be developed, out of fear that death might snatch the image away.

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FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHS

I STARTED to appreciate photography (appreciate: the word is appropriately low key) while flipping through Volker Kahmen's book, Is Photography an Art? At the time, I was writing a current-events column for a magazine, and the press attache for Editions du Chene, which was publishing the French edition, sent me a copy, quite by accident I assume. I wrote a short article, and she continued to send me books. So I learned about photography from the catalogs of Editions du Chene: Diane Arbus, whom I liked at once, overwhelmingly; Tony Ray:Jones, whom I also liked, and whose photograph of the young students from Eton was equally overwhelming. I liked it because I would have liked to wear their uniform, I liked it because I found them beautiful, because they belonged to an unknown world that could never belong to me-Eton college. From the beginning, I liked it as much as I would like Fermina Marquez by Valery Larbaud, and Reunion by Fred Uhlman: the photograph revealed similar secrets. It seemed as if I could construct a novel based on their young and dignified faces. I never tired of imagining different scenarios, and using them as actors. For example, I could have made them act out 'Young Torless. (My fantasy of the college crystallizes around this photograph.) With Diane Arbus, I especially liked the photograph of

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the young mongoloids in their bathing suits, bending their heads backward or skipping on the grass. I found in this picture an emotion similar to madness, or happiness, I was never able to determine which, and it was this disturbance, something between horror and freedom, that fascinated me. Was I supposed to enjoy this image, and was my enjoyment legitimate? But I think we have the same reaction about nearly all of Arbus's photographs. In Volker Kahmen's book there was a photograph by Hoyningen-Huene that I liked, a very elegant, carefully composed picture of two people in bathing suits. They are on a diving board and seen from the back. I liked their bare shoulders, but I especially liked the fact that the individuals' sex couldn't be determined. I felt a similar disturbance in front of this photograph as when crossing a girl in the street who looks so much like a boy that it's impossible to tell, or a boy who looks just like a girl-from this skipping back and forth, these successive reversals between the sexes. Should I desire, or not? Is it even worthwhile to define my desire in this way? I could make a collection of my favorite photographs; that is, I could make a list and scratch out the names one after the other, like shooting at those moving rows of silhouettes mounted on ball bearings at country fairs. But I'm suspicious of the collector's passionI'm afraid that it will turn into a petty obsession, a form of mechanical accumulation. I could easily choose one photograph from each photographer's work: from Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photograph of the little boy throwing his head back and dancing in front of a peeling wall in Valencia in 1933; from

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Manuel Alvarez-Bravo, the photograph from 1934 of the young worker who's been assassinated; from Paul Strand, the young peasant from the Charente; from Edward Weston, one of the six nudes of his son Neil; from Bill Brandt, the young codfish porter, on whom the dead fish perched on his head looks like an extravagant hat; from Edouard Boubat, the photograph taken by the sea of the man with a hat carrying his sleeping son in his arms; from Duane Michals, the chaste photograph of the naked young man in a hotel room carrying a small boy, also naked, his stomach arched, on his shoulders; from Bernard Faucon, the photograph of a sail. A mast divides the image. Before a dark forest over which a storm is about to break, two pieces of a sheet appear, cut into a square and a triangle, and strips of white paper unrolled on the ground to represent the mirrored surface of the water, etc. Would this collection have a theme other than my own tastes, an insignificant and capricious predisposition? Childhood? Death? The pedophoric theme of the man who carries a child in his arms? Or just a cocktail made of all these tendencies? I could buy these photographs: they are now worth between 1,000 and 3,000 francs. I'd go to galleries in Paris or New York, I'd have them removed from their drawers, from their portfolios, I'd sign a few checks, they could belong to me then and there. I even thought of buying them with the money I would make from this book. I even thought of including them in this book, but as I progress, they become foreign to my story, which is really becoming a negative of photography. It speaks of photography in negative

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terms, it speaks only of ghost images, images that have not yet issued, or rather, of latent images, images that are so intimate that they become invisible. It is also becoming something of an attempt at biography through photography: each individual history is doubled by its photographic history, imaged, imagined. But by what right would I accumulate those other images, their images, positive images? They pass through my story, they stumble against it, make themselves at home within it, but will never be mine.

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THE ARTICLE

when I was supposed to write an article on August Sander, and at once my fever climbed, undoubtedly triggered by the impossibility of writing. I was too impressed by the simplicity and perfection of those portraits, by the madness of Sander's project, which was to establish in Weimar Germany a kind of social nomenclature based on morphological types. I was restless during the night and rewrote the article countless times, coming up with nothing but cliches. A messenger, who was supposed to come by to pick it up, rang the intercom at seven in the morning, while I was still at my typewriter. My fever broke the day the article appeared. As there was an attempt at "objectivity" in Sander's photographs, I wanted to show the same objectivity in my article, provide a few biographical details, define his work in simple terms. But when I reread the article after it was printed a few days later, my fever completely gone, I found in it all the terms of my solitude and my illness. I discovered that through those photographs, which were really quite alien to me, I had only spoken of myself, and this nearly terrified me.

THE DAY ARRIVED

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"Photography has infiltrated your life. It has invaded you. Look at your apartment: the stacks of papers about exhibitions, the photographs scattered about. Even your writing is now completely oriented toward photography, absorbed by it. The only things that escape it are the little indiscretions in your diary." "You should realize that for some time now, photography has even become a physical necessity. I saturate myself with it in my work, and I also use it to relax. I come home around seven o'clock, sometimes feeling exhausted. Before, I would pick up a book and read (but reading when I'm tired only creates more wrinkles on my forehead and tires my eyes), trying to doze off a little, with my head thrown back on the armchair, my feet on the table, waiting for the telephone to rouse me from my sleep. Now, I pick up a book of photographs and look at the pictures. It soothes me, as if I had suddenly and by magic entered a landscape, but without any of the inconveniences of a real landscape, without the bad weather or the insects, without the stress, without any change whatsoever. A total equilibrium that anesthetizes my nerves. And the same is true for a portrait. Photography is involved with silence." "Photography is also kind of dumb, isn't it?" "Shut up. I intend to shake myself free of this fascination once and for all, but I haven't finished with it yet."

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FANTASY III

A WOMAN with long hair is stretched out in a porcelain bathtub, the bottom of which has previously been lined with a white sheet, as was formerly done to protect the body from the cold touch of the copper shell or from wood splinters, and she folds this sheet around her, wrapping herself completely as if it were a winding sheet, letting only her arms and the top of her bust show. The woman is old. The water in the tub is boiling hot, and small white clouds of steam form on its surface, in a bathroom that has carefully been left unheated, and with the light falling obliquely from a high window.

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THE BETRAYAL

I HAD KNOWN 1. for five or six years. I was working as a clerk for a magazine, and she came by with her agent, quite unexpectedly, to choose a photograph for the cover. She had just finished her first film, and everybody was talking about her, about her beauty, her age-she wasn't twenty yet-her brilliance as an actress. She told the art director of the magazine, "You can use any of the photographs you want, except this one." And I don't know why, whether he found the idea of betrayal appealing, or because she herself provoked this betrayal, or simply because he felt that the photograph where she thought she looked the most affected was also the most eye-catching, but it was this very photograph that he chose for the cover. 1. passed by the office a few weeks later. The magazine hadn't come out yet, but she happened to notice the first layouts for the cover on the wall and recognized the photograph she had singled out. She broke down in tears. From that day on, she swore she would exercise a tyrannical control over all the photographs that were taken of her. A few months later, she chose me from among the magazine's editorial staff(a star can always choose her interviewer) to come and do an article on the film she was making in Amsterdam. She made me wait for hours at the bar of the American Hotel and postponed our meeting

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three times. She had just been nominated for an Oscar and was scheduled to do a prerecorded spot for television that would be broadcast the same evening throughout the United States. I was finally able to have dinner alone with her, but it was only a way to delay the interview, and when I found myself with her the following day in the apartment she had rented, setting my small tape recorder in front of her, I failed to notice that she had purposely put on some rather loud music. She spoke with me a long time, but very softly, and when I replayed the tape that evening in my hotel room, I realized that she was inaudible. Nevertheless, she made me swear to erase it. The way she handled her image recalled this same attempt at effacement, restraint, extreme limitation. She had given one photographer the exclusive right to take her picture, and he was supposed to hand over to her the contact sheets and their negatives, and any slides, as soon as they were processed and before he had even seen them. She dumped them pell-mell into her bag, where she also kept a smallloupe and, as soon as she was alone, she studied them with a mixture of fear and greed, destroying the majority of them, marking the contact sheets, scratching out the corresponding negatives with her nails or the point of a needle, and bending the slides. I returned to Paris without the interview and showed up empty-handed at the magazine, but with the certitude of a new friendship. From year to year, our friendship grew stronger, based on the smallest things, telephone calls mostly-for it was difficult to see one another-and from a shared confidence, a pledge of faith.

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At that moment, 1. made a mistake with her image, which in her profession was tantamount to making a mistake in one's career: the image of the ingenue and the child prodigy with which she had been launched and manipulated hurt her, and she was ready to move on, to replace it with the all-purpose image of a sophisticated woman, a mask of makeup. Makeup didn't make her look ugly, but it made her look very commonplace: all that remained was a cold, fiat image, which I cursed every time I was confronted with it in a magazine or on a poster on a kiosk. For me, her beauty was to be found in her slender figure, her extreme paleness, her nearly transparent skin through which the veins appeared, and in the delicacy of her neck and wrists. In place of this, all I saw was a model, just like a thousand others, when I didn't see a kind of powdered Easter egg, illumined with unwieldy jewels. On several occasions, we had spoken of taking photographs together, and the rage that the cover of the most recent fashion magazine provoked pushed me in that direction, or so it seemed. I told her I wanted to photograph her without makeup, in a very simple black dress. I pictured her in the lion house or the reptile room at the Jardin des Plantes, having strayed into the acrid dampness, surrounded by crocodiles, by growling, by rusted metal and stone. When we arrived there, I realized that the light meter in the camera a friend had lent me was not working. I didn't dare tell her for fear of never being able to reduplicate the photographs and took them by evaluating the light according to my recollection of the proper settings. When I left her, I would have been incapable of saying whether I was pleased or displeased

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with the session. More than anything, I was afraid the photographs would turn out badly. She insisted on coming with me to see them the following day, when I would pick them up from the lab. When she saw me, the young girl at the lab handed me the packet at once, saying with a touch of irony, '~e you the one who took these pictures?" "Yes, why? Did they turn out bad?" I hadn't yet opened the packet, and I was furious that someone had looked at them behind my back. But the photographs weren't bad: the majority were technically correct, and nothing more. 1. told me she liked them very much, that it had been a year since she had done any photographs, and she wanted to put them all up on the wall in her apartment. I had three prints made of each of the best ones and gave her a set. A few days passed. I was supposed to leave soon to spend a week in Venice. I often looked at the photographs with growing perplexity, not knowing if I should be content or disappointed. I didn't get the impression that they were really mine and felt frustrated when I considered what I had spent on them. I said to myself, Maybe they're good portraits of 1., and that's all. Having made them, I couldn't figure out what to do with them. I read in a newspaper that the reptile room and the lion house of the Jardin des Plantes had just been closed to the public for renovation. Those places would never again be the same, and 1. could never return to them. Because of this, the image should have been unique, but, strangely, in my eyes, this didn't increase its value. On the morning of the day when I was supposed to leave for Venice, I woke up and, on impulse and somewhat

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surprised at myself, decided "to sell I. 's pictures, and to the magazine with the greatest circulation." I tried to call I. to let her know, but she was not at home, and her absence was comforting. I went to the offices of the magazinewhere I was unknown-and said calmly to a fat, timorous man who claimed to be in charge, "I have some photographs of I. Are you interested?" "How much do you want for them?" "10,000 francs." "You can't be serious. You're probably not familiar with the rates, that's too much for nine photographs, and they're not even in color." I hesitated and agreed to leave the photographs in return for a check for half the amount I had requested. But I didn't deposit the check, and called I. again. She still wasn't at home. I wrote her a letter, then a second, and left her the telephone number of my hotel in Venice. I was in a sweat, stretched out on my bunk in the train; I couldn't get to sleep, feeling dazed, depressed, humiliated, regretting what I had done as being a stupid, thoughtless act, a betrayal, something horribly petty. When I arrived, I. called. I burst into tears. She had just received my letters. She said to me, "You really weren't happy with me were you? You wanted to get back at me." I wrote her another letter: I had dreamt that I was in a small biplane flying between two high mountains and falling straight into the gorge of a ravine down which kayaks were descending; then I was crouching in a grove of trees, on a hill, where I saw, clinging to the rock and blending in with it, large mastiffs who were hunting wild horses, biting their necks till they bled. With a razor, I cut the paws of a mastiffwho was choking a horse. That evening, I took the train back to

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page 85 act of taking photographs? We covet an object—the stake is insignificant—we miss our shot or hit the bull’s-eye, the

page 90 Île Saint-Louis, my attention was drawn to a scene I would have liked to photograph: a tall boy with tousled hair who

page 96 distinction between them is fascinating: the censored image is more erotic than a nude, the pornographic image becomes erotic.

page 103 defines a succession of exteriors, is a readymade frame. The red light that stops the machine is like a shutter. The

page 104 immanent respect among the passengers is such that you would have to run like a thief after the first photograph

page 123 in short, a kind of putsch. But this explanation was inadequate. I must have been on my guard.

THE PROOF

on Friedrichstrasse, leaving East Berlin, the man in uniform holds the open passport in his hand, and his head and eyes make a dozen passes-abrupt, mechanical, but precise-between the photograph and the face, to verify the concordance, the similarity of each point: the face could be said to be divided into zones of resemblance, and with each glance, he strikes a key, he pardons the piece of your face that, as soon as it-together with the other pieces---completes the puzzle suggested by the photograph, gives the green light, the permission to leave. The photograph is the absolute proof: covered with numbers, dates, names, seals and signatures, it gives you the right to be on one side of the wall or the other. But the customs agent's gaze, in its abrupt movements back and forth, makes him dizzy. And what if his gaze suddenly collides with one of the pieces and jams, setting off an alarm? What if, suddenly, my face no longer resembles the photograph? What if my customary physiognomy fails me, or the image itself loosens its hold on me? What if the gaze of the robot at customs suddenly fails and no longer tallies with the central computer that handles the codes of resemblance? What if my own gaze, suddenly overcome with anguish, begins to wander? Or if my mouth tightens?

AT THE CUSTOMS CHECKPOINT

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Or if an entire portion of my face collapses? I would be finished, there would be nothing left but to have my picture taken again in the first available photobooth, and the disparity between this image and the valid image would be even greater. The customs agent asks a girl to push back her hair so he can see her ears, for her ears, visible in the photograph, are now concealed beneath a mass of hair. And he verifies that the ears are really pierced, like those in the photograph. But the hole in the photograph might be the result of retouching, the holes in the ears may be recent, made after the photograph was taken, and the photograph may be the uncertain proof of a simulacrum of authority.

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THE RETOUCHING ARTIST

I N A DAR K STU D I 0, between presses and drafting tables, among her brushes, her inks, her pencils, her pastels, and her small bottles of chemicals, whose composition she refuses to reveal, the retouching artist is bent over a map of the world. One day, a photographer comes to her with a group of prints for an exhibition, whose negatives have been slightly scratched. The model has freckles over her entire body. When he goes back for the prints, the photographer can no longer see the small white scar that bothered him, but the model's freckles are gone as well. Accustomed to perfection, the retouching artist made them disappear with a flick of the wrist. Another photographer brings her some photographs that a laboratory had unskillfully tried to retouch. The retouching artist grows angry: "I don't like it when somebody else does my work for me." She cleans the photograph somewhat roughly with a piece of cotton soaked in alcohol. The photograph begins to buckle. "Don't worry, I'm used to it." And she takes an electric dryer shaped like a snail to dry the print. When he comes to get it, the photographer looks in vain for the tiny defect he wanted to remove; turning the print at different angles to the light won't help him find it.

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Her clients are advertising agencies, photo labs, drawing studios, fashion magazines, weeklies, dailies, pharmaceuticallaboratories, and, of course, photographers. "We always start from the photograph," she says. "We work on bromide papers, add color. It's done with chemicals. When a photograph is printed, it loses some of its quality, so it needs retouching. Everything has to be enhanced, the light areas have to be made brighter, the dark areas darker, and the middle tones need more separation. In a black and white photograph of a jewel, for example, you have to add brightness, highlights. It's the same for faces. In general, you find that you're less attractive in a photograph than when you're looking at yourself in a mirror. The photograph doesn't hide anything. We can reinforce a face that lacks relief, one without modeling in the jaws or the cheekbones. We can correct a drooping eyelid or an eye when it's bigger than the other one. A face is often asymmetric, retouching gives a purer line to the mouth, makes it equal on both sides. Freckles, pimples, and circles around the eyes aren't exactly recommended for selling beauty creams, so we remove them. You have to get rid of the wrinkles that result from fatigue but be careful not to remove the ones that are expressive. In a similar way, the most beautiful hand has its imperfections, so we refine the joints. But you mustn't remove too much. Of course, you have to know something about anatomy ... A retoucher also creates photographic montages: if an important weekly decides to remove some people who are in the way to emphasize more well-known individuals in a picture, we use chemicals to do away with them. What I

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mean is, we can go down to the white of the paper with products that dissolve whatever was printed on the photograph. We return to the blank film." Among the advertising agencies, the media, and consumers, retouchers play the part of secret agents, obscure and unnameable executioners, great exterminators of imperfection. The retouching artist cleans up and embellishes reality. But she is also something of a magician: she can make a grounded airplane fly, can put hair on a bald head for an advertisement of a lotion that prevents baldness. She can close eyes that are open and open eyes that are closed. She can make the dead walk.

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THE FAKE

I HAD a strange dream about the photograph by Manuel Alvarez-Bravo of a young man who has been assassinated: I wanted to buy the photograph and had left a deposit with the gallery that held it. The photograph shows a worker who has been killed during a demonstration in Mexico in 1934. His belt is still shining on his stomach, beneath his open white shirt, and his blood gives the impression of a gag on his mouth, extending his neck with a long flaming mane. His arm is outstretched along the ground, very far from his body, as if he were flying. I went to pick up the photograph at the gallery. Lightly taped across the back, it had already been mounted by Alvarez-Bravo himself to a mat with a colored inner border. But the dream had also covered it with a thick, unsightly sheet of plastic-no doubt to protect it-which I wanted to remove. The photograph was imprisoned in a plastic sleeve that was too narrow for it, from which I had difficulty sliding it out. I thought that the only purpose of all this paraphernalia was to hide a defect in the photograph, or to pass off a bad print. But all I withdrew from the plastic envelope was an entirely different and very ordinary photograph, which showed a seated man, somewhat heavier than the worker, whose eyes were simply closed. Death was nothing but the result of retouching, the

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blood had been drawn in reverse on the back of the plastic sheet. A., who had sold me the photograph, angrily crumpled it between her hands, and I wanted to uncrumple it, to prove her fraud. T., who had accompanied me, said, "But you must expect a great deal from this photograph if it affected you so much that you wanted to buy it? It was perfect, you should never have taken it out of its plastic sleeve." I was angry with Alvarez-Bravo, not for having produced a fake, but for having played with death in this way (he was selling me a phony death, and for the price, I wanted a real one). Upon waking, the mysterious plastic sleeve, the deceptive transparent sheet, appeared to be among photography's ineluctable truths. The passage of time across a photograph is like a mask of makeup; time bears the photograph along, deflects it. Fascinating and obtuse, it ends up relating something other than itself

TRANSPARENCIES

To EVOKE A FACE, we have a kind of mental transparency at our disposal, more or less immediate, more or less vague, more or less distant in time. We have in our head, just behind our eyes, where there seems to be another screen, storerooms of images that are more or less familiar, more or less ready to function. There are more distant storerooms, located higher up, where we go from time to time to look for an older and somewhat forgotten transparency, a face that slides over imperceptibly from the other side before falling irretrievably into a trap, or into a fire. And sometimes we never find the transparency again, we only have the number of its storeroom, for it has wandered off somewhere. All we have is a name. So we review all the pictures from the same storeroom that haven't been lost, and we try to recreate the sacrificed image, through superimposing, cross-checking. But sometimes nothing appears that is tangible, nothing but the shape of a nose, like some ugly prosthesis, nothing but the inflection of a voice, like notes from a half-broken music box, or the color of hair, the memory of a piece of clothing, a very indistinct odor, always diaphanous or rotting: nothing more than a very fluid and incomplete image, painful for the effort it requires of us, and in its plea to exist again. These images are a kind of abstraction, a kind of cer-

tainty of existence, of sympathy or antipathy. They are not really close-ups, but rather miniature close-ups, like the shrunken heads of the Kabyles. They are also like the vibrations of the final vision, the final voice fragments resonating in the silence just before sleep. I tried to recall the transparencies from my most familiar storerooms, the ones nearest: they seemed to be fixed forever, immovable. Perhaps they are also the most abstract, because I have no need to recompose them; they are immediate, they are at hand; I wouldn't be able to get rid of them even if I wanted to: my parents' faces, T's face, Y's face, C.'s face, M.'s face, p.'s face, F.'s face, even the dead face of B., even the faces I'll never see again. They are situated in layers, at varying distances, and I can easily transfer them from one storeroom to another, make them advance or retreat, for at times I have to rearrange the storerooms, and sometimes I throw things out, or rather, they dispose of themselves, they lose their grip, they give up their place, as if they were biodegradable. Some faces I've seen only once, and they withdraw forever, despite all my efforts. With them, I'm walking up a down escalator, they're too heavy, they're deadweight, and, sooner or later, I'm forced to let them fall. But I try to understand what it is that defines the most tangible faces, what details have fixed them in place, whether they are masks or auras. The most distant faces are like images that are too dark or too light, they require restoration, a longer exposure, they regenerate themselves very slowly, and for each memory there are duplicates of duplicates, always a bit further removed from the original. The most familiar faces

are no longer even constituted by the color of their eyes, the lines of their mouth or their nose, not even by their age. They are essential images, inclusions, clumps that can't be uprooted. (They say every death brings about the destruction of a photographic reserve that reappears one last time in a corridor of consciousness.)

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THE PHARMACIST OF RUE VAUGIRARD

ON RUE V AUGIRARD, opposite my apartment but slightly farther down the street, was a small, extremely narrow store, a pharmacy, obscured by the two clothing stores that hemmed it in on either side. It was always dark, with its wainscot of old varnished wood and its porcelain jars with Latin names that must have contained all sorts of herbs, balms and powders. But the pharmacist himself was a very dignified old man, always alone, perhaps a widower or a bachelor, to be seen only in a navy blue suit and bow tie, of which he seemed extremely proud. He lived in the back room, as narrow as the store itself, and would sell only certain products, the others being too frivolous for him. He still weighed out his own preparations on a small balance, working with a pair of tweezers, and he set off a terrifying metallic noise whenever he hit the keys of his cash register. He was probably too old to work, but he didn't want to stop, and exercised a haughty politeness with his clients. Behind his too thick glasses, it appeared as if his white brows and eyelashes were disintegrating, sprinkling the lapels of his jacket with fine dust. Every day at precisely 12:30 he closed his store and very slowly crossed the street and entered the cafe opposite. He didn't have to order; the waiter, who called him "doctor," immediately brought to his table some deviled eggs and a

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glass of beer. The doctor then had a piece of the day's fruit tarte, after having asked the waiter what flavor was available; but he only asked out of habit, never listening to the answer. I used to watch this old man regularly and would enter his store with veneration, almost with fear. The medicinal odor was stifling and there were few clients. When you asked for a specific brand of medication, he inevitably brought a different one, and if you insisted, he would tell you that it was no longer available, or that he refused to sell it because he considered it to be bad or ineffective. He only seemed to work for the pleasure of it, for he refused to let salesmen use his windows, and was contemptuous of money. One day I wanted to photograph him. I was certain that the store would soon disappear, that I had to work quickly. I hid my small camera in my coat pocket and walked up to the pharmacy. I passed in front of the window several times. There was always someone in the store, entering or leaving, and I began to walk around nervously, pacing up and down the sidewalk. I was afraid the storekeepers on the opposite side of the street would notice my behavior, as if I were getting ready to assault someone, and I walked away. I came back and went directly into the store. I felt the old man's gaze on me, and found him looking at me suspiciously from behind his heavy glasses, and could only ask for the first medication that came into my head. I could easily have aimed my camera at him when he came out of the back room and fled, but I didn't. I returned five minutes later, camera in hand, and asked his permission to take a picture. He ordered me to leave at

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once and, since I appeared to hesitate, he opened a drawer into which he put his hand and again ordered me to clear out, as if his hand was about to pull a revolver from the drawer, or some blinding spray. I left, cold and shivering. The request to take a photograph, even when polite, was so violent, so threatening to him that he countered it with a weapon, or at least the gesture of drawing one, for there may have been nothing in the drawer. A few weeks or a few months later, I noticed that the pharmacist's store had been completely redone and modernized. The wainscot of varnished wood had been replaced by sliding metal drawers, the porcelain jars had disappeared. I had passed in front of the store every day when taking the bus but refused to notice the work being done. The old man in the suit had been replaced by young women in white blouses. I never saw him again.

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THE PHOTOGRAPH, AS DEATH AS POSSIBLE

CLOSE TO

I MUST HAVE KNOWN R.B., the writer, for about six months-ever since I sent him my first book and he answered me, ever since we began writing to one another. That was in the fall of '77 (I found the date in my diary). Then we met, and we had dinner together several times. He lives alone with his mother, who is already quite old and sick. She is often the one who answers the telephone, I know her voice. But throughout the fall, R.B. postponed all our meetings. His mother was ill, he was helping her. His own voice on the phone became weaker and weaker, and sad, marked by a weary politeness. I pictured him in that dark, stuflY apartment on Place Saint-Sulpice, playing the piano very softly for the pale, tired old woman resting between her white sheets, but always managing to get upI can see her now-to cook dinner for her son. And in return, he read to her, amused her quietly, sung softly to her, placed his lips on her eyelids heavy with fever. One day, I wrote him a letter expressing my desire to photograph him with his mother, since it was to her that he devoted all his time and attention, since it was primarily this bond that was strongest. The photograph could have been simple and ordinary in itself (moreover, I imagined a rather academic picture: his mother lying down or seated in a chair, him standing near her, perhaps holding

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her hand), it could even have been technically faulty, it would still have been strong. At that moment, it was "the" photograph of R.B., the only one possible for me. I received no answer and was worried that my proposal, though formulated with a great deal of precaution, might have shocked him, or simply irritated him, since it added to the pressure of the demands already made on him: requests for prefaces, articles, radio and television appearances, photographs, the use of his voice or his image, and finally theft, the time and energy stolen from his own work. Maybe ten days later, barely ten days later, I called him, somewhat apprehensive about his response. His voice was even less animated, fainter than it usually was. I asked him if he had in fact received my letter. He said to me, "Haven't you heard? Maman died ten days ago ... " So he had received my letter when his mother was dead, or was about to die, or had just died. I didn't try to figure out the exact moment when my letter arrived, or if it had pushed him deeper into despair, or if he had rejected it contemptuously, out of disgust for my half-involuntary lack of delicacy. I apologized profusely, but he ignored my excuses and again delayed seeing me, using as a pretext the suspension of time caused by death, the removal of the body, the inheritance papers, but also the renewal of pain, the growing accustomed to absence, the very slow and difficult entrance into a new world, the world without her, the world without maman. I was afraid this letter would remain between us forever like a dark stain, a regret, a blunder. But this strange event (strange because it failed, and the

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photograph, snatched from me by death, had not been taken), made me conscious of one thing: that which I wanted to photograph, this desire that manifested itself so rarely in me, was always close to death, and thus close to indecency, and in those situations where the proposal had at the same time been "superseded," as it was here, close to being an excuse. C.R., to whom I expressed my desire to photograph the actor M.L. with his paralyzed mother, and his aunt, at about this time, used the word "vicious" to qualify my request. But this request-"as close to death as possible"-is in fact common, almost trivial, in photography. For isn't it the job of every reporter, every photographer sent to cover war, famine, or natural disaster, to bring back the photograph that is as near death as possible, and sometimes the photograph of death itself? I still see the revolver pointed at the temple of a grimacing face that's going to burst into pieces a second later, or the man remaining on his knees, headless, after the passage of the sword. A photograph representing death, the moment immediately preceding it or immediately following it, and always as close as possible to it in time or space, even if it's technically bad, blurred or poorly framed, even if the photographer is unknown, is already a salable picture: It will inevitably find its way into the media, over the satellites, to travel through and be broadcast from one country to the next. It will be reproduced and multiplied an infinite number of times, it will remain in our imagination, innumerable, suspended, always vibrating, like some tiny threat, or accompanied by our pleasure at being outside the frame and yet able to see.

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(But in a painting, it is the wound we look at, the red opening in Christ's side, and in the street, the excrement left by a dog. So why shouldn't photography's two biggest attractions also be blood and waste?)

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FANTASY IV

THE SCENE takes place in a lecture hall for anatomy. The students-young men and women in white smocks-have come down from the semicircular benches to get nearer the master and his subject. An anatomical model is present, along with rows of jars, trays holding various instruments for dissection, knives, scalpels, flat and curved scissors. The master is the bald man with the bare head, wearing wirerimmed glasses, who appears in all the photographs. At the bottom of the steps, the center of the hall is covered with sand or sawdust, like a circus ring. The subject for study is a naked young man who has recently died, on whom no wound, no discharge can be distinguished. He is simply very pale and completely covered with powder, with his eyes closed, his mouth smooth and pure, almost smiling, as if he were daydreaming. His back rests on a narrow slab of marble with its cast-iron legs fixed in the sand or, as the case may be, the sawdust. His pelvis, with his limbs spread, rests on a wooden plank in the shape of a "T", like a washerwoman's paddle. His legs are raised, and his feet hang in the air, as for a genital examination. The marble slab ends at his shoulders, and his long black or blond hair falls loosely. His head would hang in the air if his neck wasn't supported by a small steel cradle, which is padded with the remains of a torn white sheet,

and whose slender support is also fixed in the sand, on a small base a short distance from the table. The master and his students move slowly away from the subject, until they disappear completely from the frame. In the second image, seen from a distance, it seems as if the young man's neck has been peeled into strips, exposing a dark integument whose tissues are wonderfully delineated. In the final image, in the empty hall, a white cloth has been thrown over the young man's head to hide his wound.

A CRUEL ACT

By PLASTERING the city-Rue de Rennes, the intersection of Saint-Germain, all the places where she passed the night before, or the day of her death-with pictures of the young nineteen-year-old girl whose body was found in pieces in the kind of plastic bag used by the medical school for dissections, the police force the passerby to commit an act of cruelty. (I only decided to write about the posters after months of waiting, and not before she was removed from the glass doors of stores around the city, as if her disappearance deferred for a while the obsessive spell cast by the photograph.) The picture was banal, taken during a vacation, in full sunlight and in front of a dense bush in a region of arid scrub somewhere in the south. The young girl is wearing a white T-shirt the edge of whose collar, falling near the middle of her neck and exaggerated by the powerful contrasts of black and white, conceals a sinister imprint, for her neck must have been cut at this very spot, and the head has still not been found. This head is still alive in the photograph. The young girl turns her eyes sideways to avoid facing the sun, where the photographer, probably inexperienced and perhaps the murderer, has posed her. Moreover, the fact that she is in direct sunlight is already a gentle form of torture, which makes her look like she's perspiring

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and eliminates any frankness from her expression. The text beneath the picture fills in the gaps in our imagination and spells out the request for information, for incrimination. Before her death, the young girl was dressed in the following way: black leather jacket,jeans, and carrying a bag that looked like a game pouch. Everything is described down to her shoes, black ankle boots that still bear a few traces of white, for she had recently dyed them. Someone had lent her a Sony Walkman. The physiognomy was quickly gotten out of the way, tinting her eyes hazel and her hair slightly blond in the photograph, as if it were hand colored, and creating an image of the shape of her body, which extends below the photograph, framed just above the breast. This anthropometric description becomes pornographic when it reveals to us other more intimate parts of the bodythe small, somewhat fleshy beauty mark at the base of her neck, hidden by the T-shirt, this long scar on her elbow by which she was identified. Those two precious details that the murderer may have kissed, that caused him to lose his head, and that then betrayed him. The body of details leaves the picture and comes to life in a kind of imaginary cinema. By placing this text between the picture and the passerby, the voyeur, the poster unreels a second text between them, like a strip of film put together from bits of information, from newspapers, which is the murder itself and which, in one sense, forces the voyeur into a sadistic act: to commit the murder again himself, as if he were reconstructing the crime. We cannot prevent ourselves from projecting its future-which is the crime-onto this living face.

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Was the young girl killed at home and her body brought to the medical school to be disposed of? Or was she invited to the school under the pretext of visiting the dissecting rooms, until the moment came when she realized that her own fate was to be among the cadavers? Did someone try to push her, leaving no proof, no trace, into a deadly trap? Because they are completely imaginary, we superimpose on the photograph, the vital presence, a mass of pain and fear, as if it were veiled by a sadistic double, a reel from a snuff film. (Those films made for sadists that the Mafia is said to produce in the United States, in which the actors' death in front of the camera is not simulated.) The passerby becomes the murderer and wants to prove his innocence.

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PROOF BY THE ABSURD

HERE IS the proof that photographs are not innocent, that they are not dead letters, inanimate objects embalmed in fixer. Here is the proof that they are an active force and that they betray what is hidden beneath the skin. Here is the proof that they weave not only lines and grids, but plots, and that they cast spells. Here is the proof that they are an impressionable material that welcomes spirits. Here is a reason to believe native Americans, who regard the taking of a photograph as a form of murder. Here is a reason to justify certain feminine superstitions ... The scene takes place in Paris, Rue Saint:Jacques, in a small bookshop crammed between a tanner and a Vietnamese restaurant. A sign: Occultism. The window is entirely filled with books that have names like The Villa if Silence or The Land if Blue Mountains. Their subjects are reincarnation and spiritism. A magician once lived here and continues to haunt the house, even though his body is buried in Pere-Lachaise. Lines traced on schematized hands, the movements of the planets, prevent one from seeing through the glass door into the shop. Upon entering, you are struck by a strange perfume that floats, amber-colored, in small bottles; perhaps it's only incense. A few of those superstitious women we mentioned earlier have come here with their daughters; they are seated, waiting for the word

that will save them. A solid door on which the word "Private" is written hides the place of revelations, the silent hustle and bustle, the sleepless nights spent-as promisedin concentration, in endlessly passing the pendant back and forth over an effigy, in the laying on of hands in order to remove the evil spirit, those sleepless nights that-we have his word-have hollowed out the circles under the eyes of the seer. But such pain, such insomnia, is not expensive, only forty francs, as you'll soon see. Nevertheless, a slightly feebleminded-looking man has just deposited 360 francs into the register. The cashier doesn't look at all like a charlatan. He's not wearing a fez or rings with intertwined serpents; his gaze does not burn like a ruby. On the contrary, his gaze is as dull as his suit; the knot on his tie is too thick, and his slightly greasy hair does little to conceal the dandruff. But it is mostly falsehood that glimmers in the midst of his dull gaze, and a tranquil, self-assured avarice. The story will thwart our suspicions. The heroine of this story-and it is a true story-is called 1. For several months, for nearly a year, she felt herself being crushed by something she couldn't identify. When she went to take a step, she had the impression that a hand was holding back her leg. When she wanted to get up, she had the impression that this same hand was moving in the opposite direction, forcing her to sit back down. She explained this to a friend who had returned from a trip to the East and who told her, "Maybe you're under a spell. I know a man who can detect spells by looking at your photograph. And he can remove the spell. I'll take you to him." She agreed and gave the man a false name, for her real name is

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well known. The man, whom we've already described, greeted her as follows: "I need a photograph, but not just any photograph, a fresh photograph, from a photobooth or a polaroid, you understand, a photograph that hasn't passed through the hands of strangers, a photograph where the fixer hasn't had time to take hold, and especially one that hasn't been mixed during development with other rolls of film, where the rays could have crossed and the fluids contaminated each other, a photograph that hasn't been retouched. But it's not the physiognomy that's important. We possess a third eye, we can detect whatever is hidden, and if you are the victim of some influence, we will expose it, my wife and 1. Go to the Maubert subway stop, there's a photobooth there, and come back to see me." 1. returns with the photograph, in color on a white background, still almost damp and in which a kind of blue halo already seems to have formed around her head. The man offers her a pair of scissors to cut one of the pictures off the strip from the machine. "Come back in a week. Yes, a week. What do you expect; there are 160 cases to examine ahead of yours." Before she leaves the shop, a man enters and gives his name. His photograph is handed to him at once. "No sir, you're not under a spell, that's forty francs for the research." The following Friday, 1. returned to the shop. The man recognized her immediately. "Yes, you've been under a spell since November 1979. You have a litde Indian that's been bothering you, we're going to get rid of him." 1. searched her memory for some event that would coincide with the date he gave her, which was why we had to tell this story backwards.

In November 1979, the best friend of 1.'s husband died of an overdose, and her husband developed an overwhelming sense of guilt, because he was the one who had provided the drug. His guilt fell upon 1. She kept a photograph of the dead young man in her apartment, in her bedroom. It was the last photograph taken of him, and in it, he is sitting cross-legged, like an Indian. Moreover, he added the words "the Indian" to his name, beneath the picture, as if to cast a spell on 1. and at the same time defy the magician, who more than a year after his death would unmask him. During the year, the Indian in the photograph attached to the wall would have had the time to enter 1.'s body, like some harmful emanation. The story is disturbing. You don't believe it?

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A

MEMORIAL FOR SIMPLE HEARTS

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, having gone to see a performance by the singer D. at the Olympia (not to sneer at her, and not out of any reverse snobbism, but out of genuine curiosity), I was conscious of a sense of loss, of grief, possibly insignificant, possibly irreparable. The children were seated on their parents' stout knees. They had brought their noisemakers with them, they stamped their feet, the flash of an Instamatic went off every thirty seconds. The people next to me, a nice, simple couple, explained that they came every evening, and at the end of every song screamed the singer's name until they were out of breath, wanting to throw to her the three roses wrapped in cellophane they had bought. But they had to wait until the finale. It was real torture. These people had come to adore an image, a form in the light, a name, a voice, and especially their own adoration. The mindless words of the lyrics were unimportant. The music, often coarse and prepackaged, was unimportant. The poorly executed dance steps were unimportant. The singer sank into an abyss of vertiginous squinting and pretended to forget the words to make the audience sing. All the common stage tricks, but that was unimportant. In contrast, I realized that something was dead in my life, which was neither love nor admiration, but which has

to do with childhood and the theater, and which is this naive capacity for adoration. I live without television, without radio, without magazines. I have no more idols. I am no longer a fan-of anyone or anything. I no longer love any image enough to raise it to that level of adoration. All that remains is a cheerless lucidity that wants to be thought of as intelligence. Confronted with this gaiety or this artificial emotion, I was as stiff as an old man irritated by noise. What made others ecstatic, mortified me. I was a cold, amorphous body, resistant in the midst of a great wave of passion. And I had no right to claim that this passion was stupid or fanatic. It was still passion. At the end of the performance, the singer's dress was red, red as a corrida, and the curtain red, like the padding in a coffin. The celebration before my eyes became a killing twice over: that of the singer, who became increasingly more breathless from her encores, and that of my former idols, whom I had sacrificed without ever having intended to do so. Leaving the backstage of the theater, breaking through the agglutinated mass of admirers, I was neither jealous nor envious, just a little sad, sad from being a body alone moving against the current, solitary and eccentric.

T. told me that when he was a child he had to turn over

the photographs of the faces and bodies he liked and hide them, as if he couldn't stand them, as if they gave off a cold emanation that could be of no help to him.

RETURN TO THE BELOVED IMAGE

"WHY did you photograph me so much?" "I don't have the impression that I photographed you a great deal. I certainly photographed you less than I wanted to. Besides, I don't know why I photograph you ... maybe because I can't caress you, but I never even asked to caress you." "The idea makes me shudder." "You see, it's easier to ask to take your picture than to ask to caress you ... 1 photograph you as if I were stocking up on you, in anticipation of your absence. These pictures are like pledges, or bonds, for my desire: I don't even know if I'll ever print them, but if one day, because I am in love, your absence becomes unbearable to me, I know that I'll be able to turn to this little roll of film and develop your image, and caress you, but without making you shudder, or casting a spell on you. They say that if you want to make someone who is stubborn fall in love with you, all you have to do is surreptitiously put an apple stuck with cloves under their bed and let it rot there. A photograph works the same way, like a spell I might cast on you. By taking your photograph, I can attach myself to you, make you a part of my life, assimilate you. And you can't do anything about it. "

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THE CANCEROUS IMAGE

FOR A LONG TIME I kept only a single photograph at home: the photograph of a boy I never knew, taken by an unknown photographer in an unidentified location. I had propped it against my bookshelf, in a spot where it was impossible not to see it constantly. A large print on glossy paper, it was glued to a piece of white cardboard that quickly gathered dust. And this boy looked down upon, ruled over everything in the room, as if he were its master, or a lover or dead brother, filling it with his presence. He must have been between sixteen and eighteen years old and wore a black leather jacket open over a white shirt. He was leaning against a dirty wall that had been painted, full of stains and streaks. But it was mostly his face, strange and pensive, with his full lips, his thick nostrils, his very straight blond hair like straw that fell in his eyes. He hid his hands under his jacket, as if he wanted to warm them under his armpits; I noticed later that he also wore a black leather bracelet studded with metal, which I had initially thought was an extension of his jacket. The photograph cut him off at the waist. His gaze was self-absorbed, distant, unfocused. He didn't grow old. Perhaps he was dead, or in an advanced state of decay, but the photograph resisted. One day, I took some acid and looked at the photograph. It was

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the only object that hadn't altered, that didn't explode before my eyes. It seemed unchangeable. (I didn't see anything more because of the acid, the image had already been completely revealed to me.) Of course, everyone who came by asked me questions about this boy, but I remained silent. I wouldn't tell them whether I knew him or not, and that immediately made him important. No one knew anything about him, or what my relationship with him was, and it could easily have been imagined that I was in love with this image and dedicated a secret cult to it, that I pressed my lips to his, but they were cold and smooth and much smaller than mine, two or three times smaller ... I had stolen this picture; it hadn't been given to me. I had seen it in an apartment and had stolen it, hiding it beneath my coat, squeezed under my armpit. There was another photograph of the same boy, probably taken the same day, but "upright," vertical. I had chosen the horizontal photograph, the one that didn't show his body, his sex, the one of an androgynous young man. Later on, I tried to get the second image, but in vain. The man from whom I had stolen the first one had moved, had disappeared without a trace. The photograph wasn't signed, there was no attribution on the back, only a small red cross. The photograph became the boy, and the back of the photograph became the boy's back. Someone had tattooed this small cross on his shoulder blade-maybe they had tortured him. I lived with this image for seven years, and it never moved from this spot, no other photograph was able to replace it. Moreover, it chased away all the others that

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wanted to take up residence in the bedroom, it was always the only possible photograph. And my affection for it became more and more abstract as the paper became covered with dust. I looked at it without seeing it. Then I noticed that the image had begun its process of decay. The photograph had been glued to a piece of cardboard, and the glue had begun to eat away at the photograph from behind. The boy's face was sprinkled with small stains, tiny scratches, slight discolorations, pigmentations. He looked syphilitic. The image was cancerous. My friend sick. But I didn't want to save him. I could have had his face retouched to hide his surface wounds, then have had him rephotographed. But I preferred to abandon him to his loss. The image was unique. And there was a kind of unique gratification in watching him decay, while he had resisted so much all these years, the dust, my drugged gaze, my kisses. From time to time, I would visit him to follow the progress of his disease, establish the extent to which his skin had begun to fester and break. He was like some poor whore riddled with syphilis. He didn't complain. His gaze alone remained intact (maybe the glue had accidentally overlooked that spot), while his forehead split in pieces or became covered with scales, while his mouth twisted and shrunk, was attacked by sores and pustules, and his nostril slowly devoured the flesh that surrounded it. He never moaned, and he never extended his hand. He kept it imperturbably beneath his jacket. Maybe I was going to have to bury him, but how do you bury an image? He would never be completely dead, he

still hadn't begun to grow old. He preserved his youthful appearance, but he continued to decay. This degradation was too slow for me, however. I thought that by carefully ungluing the picture with tweezers, I could inject, by means of small syringes, medicine droppers, or instillators, additional acids, a purer vitriol, more immediate than the glue. Or burn it, let it shrivel in the fire, abandon it to the softening action of water. But the expression on his face changed. A slight cast in his eye, the result of a small chemical accident, caused him to begin looking at me, to look at me, whereas he had never looked at me before. And I could no longer bear this gaze, which became, at the same time as his mouth, more supplicating. Makeup would have made him look ridiculous. I thought of poking out his eyes, sticking them with pins and needles, of furiously attacking him, or blindfolding him. I covered the image with a cloth, but the image haunted me, and I needed more than a cloth. For a while, I kept the image in my bed, beneath the sheet that welcomed my body; I crushed it and heard him whimper. He lived in my dreams. I sewed him into my pillow. Then, after a while, I decided to wear him, directly against my skin, directly against my torso, attaching him with bandages and tape. He made me stiff, he was like a corset beneath my shirt. I couldn't see him any longer; he kissed my stomach, I imagined him holding on to me like a sleeping child, and the contact of the paper was no longer cold against my skin. It grew softer; I bathed it in my sweat and filth. He was like a dead younger brother attached to me, he was my heteradelphus. When I finally decided to remove him, when I decided

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that this attachment was ridiculous, when I finally undid the bandages and tape, I saw that the limp cardboard was empty, the image blank. But it hadn't evaporated, it hadn't dissolved in the acid of my perspiration. In a mirror, I verified that it had stuck to my skin, like a tattoo or a decal. Each of the paper's chemical pigments had found its place in the pores of my skin. And the same image formed itself identically in reverse. The transfer had saved him from his illness.

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"I feel completely empty now that I've told you this story. It's my secret. Do you understand?" '~dnow?"

"I don't want to have to ask you not to repeat it." "Yes, but now your secret has also become my secret. It's part of me, and I'll treat it as 1 do all my secrets-I'll get rid of it when the time comes. Then it will become someone else's secret." "You're right. Secrets have to circulate ... "

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Herve Guibert Born in Paris in 1955, Herve Guibert began his writing career in 1972, contributing articles on culture to the French newspaper Ie Monde. A noted photographer, Guibert also wrote works of fiction and books on photography. His Ies gangsters (The Gangsters) was published in 1988. Among his other works of fiction are Mes parents (A1Y Parents) published in 1986 and A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve la vie (To the Friend J1lho Did Not Save A1Y Life), a moving novel on the last days of his close friend, Michel Foucault, who died of AIDS. Guibert also died of AIDS in 1991.