Abstract
A key figure in recent French culture and one of the most influential French writers on AIDS from which he died in 1991 aged 36, Hervé Guibert was also a major photographer. His experience as both a theorist and a practitioner of photography informed all his writing, yet this dimension has not been given its proper critical due. Jean-Pierre Boulé and Arnaud Genon, well-seasoned travellers of Guibert’s literary work, aim to redress the balance, arguing that photography constitutes a potent form of his evolving project of self-representation. A compact, lucid introduction presents Guibert’s major aesthetic methods and strategies: his interest as a self-confessed amateur of photography in techniques of imperfection and deformation (blurred, unframed or misframed images), his predilection for the faux-semblant, and his conception of photography as an encounter between one soul and another. The seven main chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning with a discussion of Guibert’s photo-journalism for Le Monde where he consciously projects his own subjective fantasies and desires onto the images he considers, championing those photographers who encourage fictional and imaginary expansion and, like André Kertész, ‘the truth of sensations’. A fascinating study of Vice (published only in 1991), where photographs function as phantasms of writing, reveals that the literary and visual in Guibert enact a similar danse macabre between life and death-like decomposition. The chapter on Suzanne et Louise (roman-photo) (1980), an intimate ‘anti-family album’ of his two great-aunts, demonstrates Guibert’s absolute commitment to the body, (self-)exhibition and simulacrum (he stages Suzanne’s ‘death’ by photographing her on her death-bed). An incisive analysis of L’Image fantôme (1981) suggests that the photographic can be captured for Guibert only in the space of the entre-deux which is both fictional and self-fictional. Le Seul Visage (1984), the only book of his photographs published in his lifetime, is proposed convincingly as a bold attempt at auto-fictional biography. An account of nomenclature in Guibert’s photography sets up the final and longest chapter (almost 90 pages) where the authors project onto Guibert’s photographs of himself and his naked male lovers. The result is an enlightening discussion and interpretation of the dramatic processes of doubling and splitting, as well as veiling and effacement, through the subtle use of objects (most obviously mirrors) and the cultivation of over-exposure. Guibert’s use of pictorial devices like tenebrism is also examined, along with his interests in symbolism (the figure of the pietà) and the still life genre. A paradox is established: Guibert’s self-portraits may be static, yet the very process of surprising himself with own shadows and reflections produces an intricate, abstract play of light skirting the limits of figurability and introspection. Finally, the authors compare Guibert’s photography with his video diary of living with AIDS, La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (1992), which, although ostensibly more ‘real’, ends with his own painting of the martyrdom of the child saint Tarcisius, prompting claims of aesthetic redemption that are not developed. This is an excellently informed, sensitively written and immaculately presented study with an impressive attention to detail. Sixty high-quality black-and-white photographs by Guibert are featured, as well as a number by photographers who influenced him (Paul Strand, Dieter Appelt, Gisèle Freund). So keen, however, are the authors to prove Guibert’s consistency across multiple fields that it can feel at times a little predictable, even reductive. Too much dutiful citing of Guibert and an over-reliance on other Guibert critics (notably Akane Kawakami, Robert Pujade and Alain Buissine) clutter the pages, while Barthes’ duality of the stadium/punctum becomes a virtual default. Moreover, the central argument that Guibert’s photographs represent allegories of Thanatos, although compelling, would have benefited from at least the positing of a counter-argument. Yet as an accessible work of reference that makes the entirety of Guibert’s remarkable photographic project available to both the specialist and general reader, this always engaging and handsome volume succeeds admirably.