The Use of Photography

Often, from the start of our relationship, on getting up in the morning, I would gaze in fascination at the dinner table, which had not been cleared, at the chairs out of place, our tangled clothes that had been thrown all over the floor the night before, while we were making love. It was a different landscape every time. Having to destroy it by separating and picking up each of our belongings made my heart heavy. I felt as if I were removing the only objective trace of our pleasure.

One morning, I got up after M. had left. When I came downstairs and saw the pieces of clothing and lingerie, the shoes, scattered over the tiles of the corridor in the sunlight, I had a sensation of sorrow and beauty. For the first time, I thought that this arrangement born of desire and accident, doomed to disappear, should be photographed. I went to get my camera. When I told M. what I had done, he confessed to having felt the same desire.

Tacitly, from that time on, as if making love were not enough and we needed to preserve a material representation of the act, we continued to take photos. Some we took immediately after lovemaking, others the next morning. The morning pictures were the most moving. These things cast off by our bodies had spent the whole night in the very place and position in which they’d fallen, the remains of an already distant celebration. To see them again in the light of day was to feel the passage of time.

Very soon we grew eager, even excited to discover together and to photograph the always new and unpredictable composition, whose elements – jumpers, stockings, shoes – had organized themselves according to unknown laws, movements and gestures that we had forgotten, of which we had been unaware.

A rule was spontaneously established between us: never to touch the arrangement of the clothing. To move a high-heeled shoe or a T-shirt would have been wrong, as impossible for me as changing the order of the words in my journal. It would have been an attack on the reality of our act of love. And if one of us had, without thinking, picked up a piece of clothing, it was not put back for the photograph.

M. usually took several shots of the scene, framing them differently to capture all the things scattered on the floor. I preferred him to do the shooting. Unlike him, I have little experience of photography, which I’ve only practised in a sporadic, absent-minded way until now. At first he used the heavy black Samsung that belonged to me, then the Minolta that had belonged to his late father, and later the small Olympus that replaced my faulty Samsung. All three were analogue cameras.*

There was a delay of one or several weeks (the time it took to finish the film and bring it to Photo Service for development) between our taking the photos and viewing them for the first time, which was done according to a ritual:

the person who went to collect the prints was not allowed to open the packet;

both of us had to be sitting on the sofa, side by side, with a drink in front of us and a CD playing in the background; and

the photos were to be removed from the envelope one at a time and viewed by both of us.

Each time was a surprise. We did not immediately recognize the room in the house where the photo had been taken, or the clothing. It was no longer the scene we had seen and wanted to save, soon to be lost, but a strange painting, with often sumptuous colours and enigmatic shapes. We felt as if the lovemaking of the night or the morning, the date of which we already struggled to recall, had taken on material form and at the same time been transfigured, as if it now existed elsewhere, in a  mysterious space.

For a few months, it was enough for us to simply take photos, to view and to accumulate them. The idea of writing about them came up one evening over dinner. I don’t remember who had the idea first, but we knew at once that we shared the same desire to give it substance. It was as if what we’d thought until then would be enough to preserve a trace of our moments of love – the photos – was not enough and we needed something more – writing.

We chose fourteen of the forty-odd photos and agreed that each would write separately, in total freedom, never show the other anything until it was done, or even change a word. The rule was strictly observed until the end.

There was only one exception. When we started to take these photos, I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. While writing, I very quickly felt the necessity of evoking the other scene playing itself out inside my body, absent from the photographs – the blurred and stupefying (‘Is it really me this is happening to?’) struggle between life and death. I mentioned it to M. Like me, he was unable to ignore this aspect, which had been an essential part of our relationship for months. It was the only time we talked about the content of our ‘compositions’, a spontaneous, provisional name we gave to our project, corresponding (in both senses of the word) to what they were to us.

I cannot define the value or the interest of our undertaking. In a way, it belongs to the same frenzy for turning life into images that is increasingly characteristic of our age. Whether through photographs, or writing, we strove each time to give greater reality to moments of pleasure that were fleeting and impossible to represent. To capture the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind. The highest degree of reality, however, will only be attained if these written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.

Cergy, 22 October 2004

* This term, which has appeared in recent years to mark the difference from ‘digital’, just as vinyl marks the difference from CD in music, is a distinction that heralds the programmed disappearance of the former in favour of the latter. It strikes me as incongruous, impossible to apply to what for me will remain forever, simply, a camera.