In The Use of Photography, Nobel Prize–winning author Annie Ernaux recounts a passionate love affair with journalist and writer Marc Marie, which began in January 2003—just after she had undergone several months of intensive chemotherapy for breast cancer, leaving her physically transformed and emotionally raw.
In the aftermath of her surgery and radiation treatment, Ernaux found herself captivated by the disarray left behind after each night they spent together: clothes tossed on chairs, dishes from their last meal still on the table, rooms quietly charged with intimacy. Moved by these fleeting traces, she began to photograph the scenes each morning, hoping to preserve the ephemeral. When she shared this impulse with Marc Marie, he revealed he had felt the same urge.
Translated into English for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, The Use of Photography is an exquisite meditation on desire, memory, illness, and the act of capturing life’s most vulnerable moments. At once deeply personal and intellectually resonant, this slim volume affirms Ernaux’s status as one of literature’s most fearless chroniclers of the interior world.
‘The Use of Photography … 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.’
Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic‘With her signature resolute honesty, [Ernaux] dissects the power of passion and her own jealousy…. She awards herself the right to describe things just how they are without caring one jot how it reflects on her. This gives power to all her works.’ Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times
Physical Info: 7.76 x 0.63 x 5.12 inches. | 136 Pages | Paperback