In her recently translated The Use of Photography, the French writer and Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux expresses her desire for a form of writing that ‘you cannot tear yourself away from’.1 Curiously, this is an effect she associates with both photographs and stains. ‘I’m fascinated by photos’, she tells us, ‘in the same ways I’ve been fascinated, since childhood, by blood, semen and urine stains on sheets, or old mattresses’.2 It is a revealing, if unexpected analogy. Both the photograph and the stain offer a glimpse into something intimate. But even though they index real bodies and desires, they also bring us up short, showing us how much we can’t know.
Ernaux’s language has a similar effect. Reading her is an experience of seduction, but also opacity. I often feel myself absorbed entirely into her world, so immersed in her memories – of her working-class childhood, her first sexual encounter, an illegal abortion, a love affair – that I forget the coordinates of my own life. Yet her books, which blur the lines between autobiography, memoir, sociology, and ethnography, also emphasize that language cannot give us – or Ernaux herself – full access to who she once was. The past resists her. Her mother and father resist her. Her adolescent self (who she refers to in the third person – as ‘the girl of ’58’ – throughout her book A Girl’s Story) resists her.3
In an effort to negotiate this resistance, Ernaux often seeks out images. Detailed descriptions of them fill her writings: a photograph of her posing with her father; a photo of her lycée dormitory interior; a photo of her mother on her wedding day; film footage of her as a young woman lounging by a pool in Morocco. Such images reveal themselves to be charged sites of meaning and memory. But if these materials constitute a form of evidence or proof of the real, we come to realize that they are primarily provocations: occasions for questioning what has been. The image is a stimulus to language precisely because it cannot speak back.
Ernaux’s use of images takes us to the heart of what makes her writing so distinctive and also so difficult to define. At times, they allow her to articulate the sense of being seen, even judged, by the girl she once was. ‘The longer I gaze at the girl in the photo’, she writes in A Girl’s Story, a memoir of sexual awakening and trauma, ‘the more it seems that she is looking at me’.4 On other occasions, the photo stimulates an impossible longing to reenter the past, even to become her past self. In her book Shame, Ernaux describes ‘star[ing] at the two photographs […] as if looking at them for long enough might allow me to slip into the head and body of the little girl who, one day, was there in the photographer’s studio, or beside her father in Biarritz’.5
In many instances, however, her accounts of images simply present themselves as neutral descriptions of surfaces. This approach is typical of The Years, which spans Ernaux’s life from birth to the time of its composition in the early 2000s: ‘In a black-and-white photo, two girls stand on a garden path, shoulder to shoulder, arms folded behind their backs’; ‘In this photo, a tall girl blinks against the sun’; ‘In the black-and-white group photo, inserted in an embossed folder, twenty-six girls stand in three tiered rows in a courtyard’.6 Such examples speak to Ernaux’s efforts to turn herself into what, toward the end of The Years, she describes as an ‘instrument of knowledge that is not only for herself’.7 If she trains her attention on her own life, it’s not because she views herself as special. Instead, she seeks to understand her experience as typical of the cultural and political tensions of Post-war France. Ernaux’s method is a way to position herself as an object of study.
There have been a number of attempts in recent years to highlight Ernaux’s singular relationship to the photographic image. In October 2024, Fitzcarraldo published the English version of The Use of Photography (first published as L’usage de la photo in 2005), co-authored by Ernaux and the photographer Marc Marie. In this book, both Ernaux and Marie respond to photos (primarily taken by Marie) that document the traces of their love affair: discarded clothes; an unlaced boot; remnants of a meal; scattered papers.
Looking at a photograph of a rumpled bedcover, Ernaux is struck by its inability to capture ‘the love we made’, but equally by its ‘boundless meaning’.8 As I understand it, the photograph’s meaning, for Ernaux, is bound up with loss: with what the image cannot hold or sustain. Yet the photograph’s inability to capture past feeling is also the source of new possibility, she recognizes, for it is this very failure – what we might call the inevitable abstraction of the image – that allows it to become a site for the projections of others.
This capacity of the photograph to generate meaning was also the focus of the 2024 exhibition Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, which paired photographs from the MEP’s collection with passages from Ernaux’s book Exteriors, a diaristic record of everyday scenes: a young man clipping his toenails on the metro; a little girl having a tantrum; a couple buying meat. In her catalogue essay, curator Lou Stoppard argues that ‘Ernaux’s gaze cuts and slices like a lens […]. As with a photograph, much is going on out of shot’.9
Considering Ernaux’s writing as a form of photography offers a challenge to traditional ideas about the medium. Historically, because it captured the material effect of light, the photograph was understood to offer a facticity unavailable to language. ‘At one level’, John Berger notes, ‘there are no photographs which can be denied’.10 By contrast, language, however unadorned, immediately raises the possibility of fiction, embroidering, divergence from the ‘truth’. But Stoppard is onto something when she notes that Ernaux’s style ‘cuts and slices’ like the camera’s gaze. Although her primary tool is language, the strategies of the photographer – focus, framing, contrast, background – allow Ernaux to objectify her life in a way that makes us feel it could also be ours. She attends to relatable details – the awkward positioning of a girl’s arms, or the folds of a bedcover messed up after morning sex – that allow us to say: yes, I’ve known that; or yes, I’ve held myself that way. All this places pressure on memoir as a genre, enabling Ernaux to approach the territory of the sociological – yet without abandoning the intimacy that draws us in and moves us.
Ernaux’s desire not merely to recount her own life, but to use her past experience to approach ‘impersonal autobiography’ (her phrase), is made explicit in The Years.11 In this book, Ernaux rejects the first-person pronoun. ‘There is only “one” and “we”’, she explains, ‘as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before’.12 The burden of narrating something beyond herself is also central to A Man’s Place, an account of the life of her father. In A Man’s Place, Ernaux places her father’s life in the context of fundamental shifts in French society. Although raised in a family of landless peasant laborers, he later enters the industrial working-class. It is while working at a rope factory that he meets Ernaux’s mother. Together, they make the leap of purchasing a small grocery store and café, which they run for the rest of their shared life – only just scraping by, but no longer beholden to an employer.
The life of Ernaux’s father is characterized, then, by endless work and limited choices, but equally by force of will and a degree of upward mobility. And all these things, Ernaux is certain, must determine how she writes. ‘In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity’, she insists in this book, ‘I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something “moving” or “gripping”’.13 To refuse ornament and irony is the only possible response to the life she is trying to write – a stylistic approach in which the description of photographs plays a critical role.
Ernaux’s challenge in A Man’s Place is that she is not an impartial observer, however much she aims to subsume herself (and the style of her writing) to the life she is narrating. For the reality is that she is attempting not only to account for the conditions that shaped her father’s existence, but to honor the man she remembers and loves. The difficulty of this challenge becomes especially apparent in a passage in which Ernaux gazes at an image of her father and herself taken in the late 1940s, as he is approaching fifty. She begins by noting that ‘he is still in his prime, his head held perfectly straight and a worried expression on his face, as if he is afraid the photograph will come out wrong’.14 These are the small expressive details and affects a caring daughter might notice – that make the image personal for her. Yet Ernaux does not dwell on them for long. She makes a point of observing that her father is dressed, unusually, in a suit; that it is Sunday; that he is photographed in front of the café that he owned and with his hand on his car: a Citroën 4CV; that she is pictured with him. ‘It was customary’, Ernaux notes, ‘to be photographed with your proudest possessions’.15
What matters to her father in this moment of being photographed, Ernaux realizes, is that he is presenting himself in a manner that affirms the value of his labor, for her father’s self-image is profoundly shaped by his class.16 Yet this recognition only takes Ernaux so far. She can’t help but project emotions and anxieties onto her father, imagine him ‘afraid’ that the photo won’t turn out right. This also happens earlier in A Man’s Place, when she recounts discovering, inside her father’s jacket, ‘the sort of photograph one found in history books to “illustrate” an industrial strike or the Front Populaire’.17 If such a photograph now announces itself as a historical artefact, this does not change the fact that Ernaux’s own father gazes out at her from the back row, ‘looking seriously, almost worried’.18 A Man’s Place, in other words, is enlivened by a central tension: Ernaux’s sociological impulse is complicated by her desire to counter the photograph’s objectifying power, its capacity to reduce individuals to ‘types’.
In A Woman’s Story, an account of her mother’s life, Ernaux further stresses the limitations of the image, articulating her conviction that the ‘truth’ of her mother ‘can be conveyed only by words’ and insisting that a photograph of her mother on her wedding day cannot disclose the woman she has loved.19 ‘All I see’, she tells us, ‘is an impenetrable young woman’.20 This recalls a moving passage from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which he describes searching for an image of his mother that would capture her essence. Going through family photographs, Barthes is distressed by the preponderance of ‘History’ that ‘separated me from them’.21 ‘There is a kind of stupefaction’, he explains, ‘in seeing a familiar being dressed differently’.22 The sociological, for Barthes, annihilates what is personal in such images, so that they become simply sites of loss: the woman in the image is not her. Yet Barthes also ends up insisting that a certain photograph is able to return his mother to him. He tells us that, looking at the image of a young girl standing in the Winter Garden, ‘I at last discovered my mother’.23 It is precisely for this reason that he refuses to reproduce this image in his book. ‘For you’, he insists, ‘it would be nothing but an indifferent picture; one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary”’.24 Barthes is unwilling, in short, to offer us an image to which we, his readers, are indifferent, when it is the very fact that the image moves – punctures – him that gives it meaning for him.
Ernaux, too, rarely shows us the images she writes about. Yet I’d venture it’s for the opposite reason. She does not fear the reader’s indifference, but rather aims to activate the feeling of estrangement she repeatedly experiences when she looks at photographs of her past self, or her parents, or even past settings of her life. In A Girl’s Story, Ernaux describes gazing at a photograph she took of her lycée dormitory and ‘trying to be inside this cubicle in the girls’ dorm, taking a photo’.25 Yet even as the image unleashes ‘a flood of auditory sensations’, she remains on the outside, trapped in the present. ‘This room’, she observes, ‘is the real that resists, whose existence I have no means of conveying except by exhausting it with words’.26 Language is Ernaux’s response to the remoteness of the image. But it also allows her to counter Barthes’ desire for individual meaning sealed off from social life. As she explains at the end of A Girl’s Story, what ‘compels her’ to write ‘is the hope of discovering even a drop of likeness between this girl, Annie Duchesne [Ernaux’s maiden name], and any other being’.27
The felt resistance of the image yet again stimulates a demand for language in the 2022 film The Super 8 Years, a collaboration between Ernaux and her son Daniel Ernaux-Briot. A new departure for Ernaux, The Super 8 Years pairs family film footage, recorded in the 1970s and early 80s by Ernaux’s ex-husband Philippe on a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera, with a retrospective voiceover written by Ernaux. The viewer is faced, as Ernaux herself is faced, with a filmic surface: her own exteriority, captured by the camera. But more than this, The Super 8 Years offers the rare situation in which the camera’s object speaks back decades later, telling us, however partially, what lies beneath her seemingly impassive gaze.
Given that it displays the very images she had previously withheld, The Super 8 Years is undeniably a departure from Ernaux’s previous writings. Yet my understanding is that it is more accurate to view this film as an intensification of her efforts to use the personal to approach ‘collective history’ (a term she uses in The Years) – particularly because the juxtaposition of present-tense narration with footage of her past self enables Ernaux to position herself as subject and object simultaneously.28
As I watch the young Ernaux while listening to her reflections as an older woman, I find myself caught up in the middle of the writer’s process, given access to the encounter between word and image. In the case of The Super 8 Years, this encounter activates a dissonance between appearance and reality that is surely as much the film’s ‘subject’ as Ernaux herself. Reflecting on the first footage of her taken by Philippe as she walks through the door of her home, Ernaux observes: ‘What strikes me about the very first images shot is the theatrical “happening” feel which the camera brought to family life, a “happening” conceived by my husband, who filmed the moment I arrived with the kids from school and the supermarket’.29 But if the camera conjures what Ernaux admits is ‘an extraordinary moment’, she also believes that the footage is ‘tinged with a kind of violence’, because the act of filming demands compliance on the part of the filmed subjects, in this way altering and distorting reality.
At certain moments in The Super 8 Years, Ernaux appears to resist this compliance. In one segment, filmed on a family trip to Morocco, she picks a yellow blossom and descends a long stone staircase; absorbed in its fragrance, she avoids eye contact with the camera (which we must remember is an extension of Philippe’s gaze).
Mostly, though, this resistance cannot be seen, and so Ernaux must communicate it by way of language. ‘Behind the image of the nondescript young mother’, she reflects in one voiceover, ‘I can’t help but remember a woman secretly tormented by the need to write and, as I noted in my journal, “assemble all the events of my life in a novel, violent and red.”’
As the film shifts to a scene of Ernaux’s two young sons opening presents on Christmas morning, Ernaux expresses the feeling that she is living a double life: on the one hand, the life of family, of being a mother and partner; on the other hand, the writing life, the life imagined for herself as the writer she will have become. ‘Beneath the feverish, wonder-struck opening of toys’, she tells us, ‘I now perceive a different reality, one of afternoons when I don’t teach and I secretly write a novel that describes how education, culture, separated me from the working-class world of my birth’.
The sense that a fundamental opposition exists between the woman the camera shows us and her interior thoughts and feelings intensifies in the footage from Morocco. In another sequence from this trip, Ernaux is seen lounging by the pool with her son as the voiceover informs us: ‘Poolside, I thought of the finished manuscript in my desk drawer, which I’d have to type before school started. I hoped that it would save me, but I didn’t know how, or from what’. The image of Ernaux by the pool is impenetrable to me without her accompanying words – a reminder of just how little we can know about a person by looking at them. I realize that I’ve been searching in the footage of Ernaux for visual clues of an internal struggle – material traces of the desire to write, to think, to express herself. Yet all I can do is observe a composed image that Ernaux has left behind and with whom she cannot identify.
In an interview following the release of The Super 8 Years, Ernaux presents her inability to identify with her past self as enabling – the precondition of her writing – rather than a source of loss: ‘I was seeing it [the footage] with a distance that allowed me to create this narrative. […] I was seeing this different woman that had been me but is no longer me, in a context that is no longer my context’.30 Perhaps, Ernaux’s certainty in this regard also means that we, as viewers, should resist the temptation to try to find traces of her interior life in the archival footage. For if her voiceover tells us anything, it’s that she was never what she seemed to be on screen.
‘When women make films’, Laura Mulvey suggests, ‘cinema mutates in their hands and through their eyes’.31 ‘This is not to argue that there is an essential or coherent “women’s cinema”’, she adds, ‘but rather that a women-inflected cinema can take up topics and perspectives hitherto neglected or simply not imaginable by a male-dominated culture’.32 Ernaux is not herself a filmmaker. Still, I find it helpful to think of The Super 8 Years as a ‘mutation’ of Philippe’s footage. The film exposes the currents of longing that circulate beneath the everyday, contained by routines and habits of relation.
Writing on visual media often emphasizes the difference between photographs and films. In his essay ‘Appearances’, John Berger argues that photographs are ‘retrospective’, while films are ‘anticipatory’.33 ‘Before a photograph’, he observes, ‘you search for what was there. In a cinema you wait for what is to come next’.34 In one sense, Berger’s claim is borne out by Ernaux’s oeuvre. In her writing, Ernaux repeatedly finds that looking at a photograph conjures a feeling of irreducible thereness (it is a form of evidence) but also pastness (the reality it evidences in inaccessible). But in the case of The Super 8 Years, the filmic image is not exactly anticipatory. Not only can the viewer see what Ernaux sees, but what we are seeing is moving too fast. And this compressed experience of time passing – Ernaux growing older, children suddenly teenagers – throws us back on ourselves.
The Super 8 Years leaves me with a strong sense of the fundamental elusiveness of life: what we fail to see, comprehend, or catch hold of as we are living it. Yet there is nevertheless a more positive quality of expectation that structures this film.35 We know (because the very existence of the voiceover tells us so) that the young woman we are watching does not lead a double life forever, concealing her hopes and suppressing her passions. For this reason, we might conclude that, despite its chronological sequencing, The Super 8 Years, is in fact propelled by the grammar of the future anterior: the tense used to describe an action completed before a certain moment in time, a project realized. The narrating ‘I’ is not the woman entering her home, or descending the stair, or lounging by the pool, and this is not a problem. To no longer be this woman is to have become the writer she secretly dreams of being: a writer who ‘will go within herself’, as Ernaux tells us in The Years, ‘only to retrieve the world’.36