““The Use of Photography” takes its place, alongside Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” as a profound meditation on the paradoxes of this medium that has come increasingly to dominate our lives, even as we struggle to break free of it. It is also a testament to the disruptive force of desire and the power of images to stand guard as sentinels against illness, loss and death.”
– Leslie Camhi, The New York Times Book Review
“The Use of Photography is a fascinating collaboration between lovers Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, alternating entries riffing on the photographs of compositions of their clothes in various rooms, tracing the duration of an affair, kindred to the conceptual photobooks of Sophie Calle. Except this description doesn't get at the vitality of this document, its passion and melancholy, which takes on Ernaux's usual themes, this time with a surprising interlocutor—a meditation on the daily and ephemeral, mortality, the knowledge and history of the body. Not only does this 2003 text prefigure the epic meditation on photographs in The Years, but it's also where Ernaux writes, devastatingly and intimately, of her breast cancer treatment.”
– Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts and The Light Room
“This is my favorite book by Annie Ernaux. An overwhelming story about love, death, desire and illness. Everything is extraordinary here, unforgettable. We do not come out of this very intimate text unscathed.”
– Abdellah Taia, author of A Country for Dying
“In The Use of Photography, first published in 2005, Ernaux and journalist Marc Marie document their affair, through text and photos, as Ernaux is undergoing cancer treatments. A must-read for lovers of words, images, and Ernaux herself. So… everyone?”
– Jessie Gaynor, LitHub, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
“Annie Ernaux has long foregrounded physical and emotional sensations as the building blocks of her autobiographical writing. However, it is in The Use of Photography where the connection between the body and subjectivity most powerfully emerges.”
– Lisa Connell, French Forum
“All her books have the quality of saving frail human details from oblivion. Together they tell, in fragments, the story of a woman … who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.”
– Ankita Chakraborty, The Guardian
“Among the most vital works of literature produced in the last half-century.”
– Alex Shepard, The New Republic
“Beautiful writing can be a way of ‘masking power.’ Ernaux’s particular style—stripped back, forthright, unadorned—is an attempt to drop the mask, to write unsentimentally and with great dignity about class, and class mobility, and gender.”
– Lauren Elkin, Lux Magazine
“[Ernaux] has been able to endow private experience with wider significance, creating the uncanny sense among her readers… that she has spoken for them, too.”
– Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Annie Ernaux’s work presents a breathtakingly frank, fearless, many-sided account of the female experience during the past century.”
– Liesl Schillinger, Oprah Daily
“Nobel Prize winner Ernaux (The Young Man) and French journalist Marie recount their early-2000s affair through the lens of 14 photographs in this tender and evocative memoir. The pair met in 2003, when Ernaux was recovering from surgery and undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. After their first few sexual encounters, Ernaux began photographing the aftermath, resulting in lush, jumbled, and erotic images punctuated with lurid red lingerie or a pair of upright shoes that seemed to suggest a ghostly presence. In alternating chapters, Ernaux and Marie analyze photographs from that period, discussing the specter of death that hung over their trysts (at one point, Ernaux bought herself a funeral plot), the sweet devotion Marie felt for his ailing “mermaid woman,” and eventually, the end of their relationship. Each author’s candor—about their sexuality as well as the importance of such an intense connection at that crossroads in their lives—is remarkable, and is enhanced rather than obscured by the framework of photographic analysis. The results are generous, steamy, and unexpectedly moving.”
– Publishers Weekly
“A Nobel Prize–winning author and her journalist lover tell the story of their affair.
In 2003, Ernaux began a passionate relationship with her co-author, Marc Marie. At the time, Ernaux had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment and was about to have surgery for breast cancer. The author soon discovered that her physical desire for Marie was matched by an equal desire to take pictures of the “material representation[s]” of their sexual encounters. When she told Marie that she was photographically recording the “[clothing] compositions…that organized themselves according to unknown laws, movements and gestures,” she learned that he had felt a desire to do the same. In this book, Ernaux pairs 14 of the more than 40 photos they took together with two essays, each produced independently of the other, by the author and by Marie. The photos record colorful “landscape[s]” left in the aftermath of encounters that took place over several months in multiple locations, including various rooms in Ernaux’s home and foreign hotels. As they describe each “scene,” the essays provide details about Ernaux and Marie’s developing relationship, like how they spent their time together on the day of the photograph or the songs they chose to represent “the elusive succession of their days.” With her trademark clarity and simplicity, Ernaux’s essays also grapple with her struggle to come to accept both her diagnosis and the physical changes brought about by her cancer treatments, like baldness, loss of body hair, and scarring. The result of the pair’s unique word-and-image collaboration is a deeply poignant yet also celebratory expression of eroticism.
Luminous and reflective writing in the face of death.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“The title may suggest a technical manual, but The Use of Photography, published in French in 2005 and recently translated to English, is anything but dry. The moving memoir follows an intense affair between the authors that began during Ernaux’s treatment for breast cancer at the Institut Curie in Paris. Struck by the sight of clothing strewn around rooms and dinners left out overnight, the authors began photographing these compositions. The photographs both structure the narrative and serve as vehicles for meditations on pleasure, pain, melancholy, and the transience of life. The “use of photography” here is much like the use of all art: to remember, to comfort, and to record and perhaps free ourselves from the past.”
– Hyperallergic
“On mornings-after, the lovers felt that their cast-off clothes and shoes created an “arrangement born of desire and accident” that should be documented. And so they agreed to photograph these passion scenes. They also felt the need to write about these intricate floor compositions. So picture-taking and writing became part of their lovemaking. This was 20 years ago, when Ernaux, now a Nobel laureate, was being treated for breast cancer, and journalist and photographer Marie stayed close by her side. Here they share 14 photographs and their written responses, which form a duet of eroticism and musings on time and death, disorder and art. Ernaux is bracingly matter-of-fact about sex and her body’s response to chemotherapy. Marie is similarly frank, and both are funny and contemplative as they express feelings, describe their lives, and share memories and favorite songs. Like I Ching hexagrams, the tangles of clothing and shoes serve as a form of divination of life and nothingness, light and dark. This is an intimate, beautiful, and evocative pairing of image and word, voice and viewpoint, love and ritual.”
– Donna Seaman, ALA Booklist
“The purpose of the almost mundane images that Ernaux and Marie chose to include – their primary use as intimated in the book’s definitive title – lies to a great degree in the prose they have inspired. They are not so much aide-mémoires as melancholy traces of their once fervent but now dissipated desire, which Ernaux retrospectively interrogates in her inimitable way. At one point, Marie compares them to a diary of “love and death”, but it is through the writing about them – melancholy, insistent, self-questioning – that the darker themes of mortality and loss fully emerge.”
– The Guardian (UK)
“French writer Annie Ernaux has never been afraid of breaking taboos. Over the course of her 50-year career, Ernaux—the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature—has portrayed an illegal abortion (Happening), the complexities of working-class life (A Man’s Place; A Woman’s Story), and the highs and humiliations of sexual obsession (Simple Passion). The Use of Photography, published in 2005 and newly translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, approaches Ernaux’s experience of breast cancer in the early 2000s with a similar fearlessness, emphasizing sensuality in the face of death. It is a radical gesture to treat the sick body, a body threatened by its own demise, as one that is also capable of performing that most generative of acts: sexual intercourse. In doing so, Ernaux takes control of, and breathes life into, the narrative of illness and death.
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In this lineage of women writing about breast cancer, Ernaux’s focus on eroticism reminds the reader that the cancer patient still has wants and desires; that is, she is still a human being. Discussing cancer will always reveal the paucity of language—what it can and cannot say for the person suspended between life and death. By the book’s end, Ernaux has reached her own conclusion: “I can no longer abide novels or films,” she writes, “with fictional characters suffering from cancer … how do they dare to invent these kinds of stories? Everything about them seems fake.” With its aim to transmit into words and images what is so often left unsaid about breast cancer, The Use of Photography is the opposite: the real thing.”
– Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
“Ernaux’s books aren’t beautiful, suspenseful, or psychedelic. Their pleasure is cerebral, self-reflexive—and grossly invested in watching a mind tear itself apart, only to survey its pieces from an emotionless distance.”
– Alina Stefanescu, Los Angeles Review of Books
