Ghost Image

By Hervé Guibert

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.

Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.

With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9780226132488

Hervé Guibert

Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) was a writer, photographer and filmmaker. Among his many pieces of writing, To the Friend caused a scandal and quickly became his most famous work. He finished three more books, including The Compassion Protocol, and a film, La Pudeur ou L'impudeur, before he died aged 36, only one year after the publication of To the Friend.

Book preview

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Copyright © 1982 by Les Éditions de Minuit

English language translation © 1996 by Robert Bononno

All rights reserved

Originally published as L’Image fantôme (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982)

University of Chicago Press edition 2014

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13234-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13248-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.728/chicago/9780226132488.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Guibert, Hervé, author.

[Image fantôme. English]

Ghost image / Hervé Guibert ; translated from the French by Robert Bononno.

pages ; cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-226-13234-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-13248-8 (e-book)

1. Photography—Philosophy. 2. Photographic criticism. I. Bononno, Robert, translator. II. Title.

TR183.G8413 2014

770.1—dc23

2013042067

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Hervé Guibert

GHOST IMAGE

Translated from the French by Robert Bononno

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

BOOKS BY HERVÉ GUIBERT

Suzanne et Louise (Libres Hallier, 1980)

Les aventures singulières (Éditions de Minuit, 1982)

Les chiens (Éditions de Minuit, 1982)

Voyage avec deux enfants (Éditions de Minuit, 1982)

L’Image fantôme (Éditions de Minuit, 1982)

Les lubies d’Arthur (Éditions de Minuit, 1983)

L’homme blessé de Patrice Chérau (Éditions de Minuit, 1983)

Des aveugles (Gallimard, 1985)

Mes parents (Gallimard, 1986)

Le seul visage (Éditions de Minuit, 1986) [photography]

Vous m’avez fair former des fantômes (Gallimard, 1987)

Les gangsters (Éditions de Minuit, 1988)

Fou de Vincent (Éditions de Minuit, 1989)

L’Incognito (Gallimard, 1989)

A l’ami qui ne m’a pas savvé la vie (Gallimard, 1990)

Le protocol compassionnel (Gallimard, 1991)

La Mort Propagande (Gallimard, 1992)

L’Homme au chapeau rouge (Gallimard, 1994)

Cytomegalovirus: Journal d’hospitalisation (Seuil Points edition, 2004)

Mon valet et moi (Seuil Points edition, 2007)

Mauve le vierge (Gallimard, 2007)

Le Mausolée des amants (Gallimard, 2011)

Lettres à Eugène (Gallimard, 2013)

Vice (Gallimard, 2013)

CONTENTS

I used to dream . . .

Ghost Image

First Love

The Perfect Image

The Erotic Picture

Photo Souvenir (East Berlin)

A Family Photograph

A Fantasy I

Inventory of a Box of Photographs

A Possible Photo Sequence for Bernard Faucon

Home Movies

Holography

Identity Photograph I

Identity Photograph II

Photobooth (Florence)

Self-Portrait

The Album

The x-ray

Identification

The Hotel Room

Example of a Travel Photograph

Photographic Writing

Contact Sheet

The Insult

The Camera

The Fetish

The Threat

A Fantasy II

The majority of your stories . . .

Diffraction

The Rings

Premeditation

The Session

Advice

The Beautiful Image

Suite, Series, Sequence

Pornography

Porno Bis

Red Tape

The Collection

The Fovea

The Bus

Dance

Polaroid

Favorite Photographs

The Article

Photography has infiltrated your life . . .

A Fantasy III

The Betrayal

The Proof

The Retouching Artist

The Fake

Transparencies

The Pharmacist of Rue Vaugirard

The Photograph, as Close to Death as Possible

A Fantasy IV

A Cruel Act

Proof by the Absurd

A Memorial for Simple Hearts

T. told me . . .

Return to the Beloved Image

The Cancerous Image

Secrets

Notes

I USED TO DREAM about an amazing invention I saw in one of my Bibi Fricotin*: eyeglasses that can read our thoughts. But I grew frightened when I realized that they could be used against me. Later on, in some slightly lurid advertisements, I discovered the existence of eyeglasses that can see through clothing, that can expose us. I pictured photography as having the ability to combine these two powers. I was tempted to do a self-portrait . . .

GHOST IMAGE

PHOTOGRAPHY is also an act of love. Once, when my parents were still living in La Rochelle, in that large bright apartment entirely surrounded by a balcony overlooking the trees in the park and, a little further off, the sea, I decided to take a picture of my mother. I must have been eighteen years old, and I had returned home for the weekend. I suppose it was May or June, a sunny day, a day of cool, fresh, and gentle sunshine.

I had already photographed her on vacation with my father, without giving it much thought. They were quite ordinary pictures that said nothing of the relationship we may have had, of the attachment I may have felt for her, pictures that stubbornly revealed only a part of her, a physiognomy. Besides, most of the time my mother refused to be photographed, pretending that she was not photogenic, that the situation immediately put her on edge.

If I was eighteen, it must have been in 1973, and my mother, who was born in 1928, must have been forty-five, an age when she was still quite beautiful, but a desperate age, when I felt that she was at the threshold of old age, of sadness. I should mention that until then I had refused to photograph her because I didn’t like her hairstyle, which was artificially curled and lacquered into one of those terrible hairdos that my mother wore, alternating it with her permanents, and that encumbered her face, framed it inappropriately, hid it, falsified it. My mother was one of those women who take pride in resembling an actress, Michèle Morgan in this case, and who go to their hairdresser with a picture taken from some magazine, so that the stylist, with the picture as his guide, re-creates for her the identical hair style. So my mother had her hair done almost like Michèle Morgan, whom I obviously began to hate.

My father forbade my mother to wear makeup or dye her hair, and when he photographed her he ordered her to smile, or he took the picture against her will while pretending to adjust the camera, so that she had no control over her image.

The first thing I did was to remove my father from the room where the picture was to be taken, to chase him away so that her image would no longer pass through the one he had created of her, through his need to keep up appearances, so that she was thus temporarily freed of all the pressure that had built up over more than twenty years, so that there was nothing left but our own complicity, free of husband and father, just a mother and her son. (Wasn’t it in fact my father’s death that I wanted to stage?)

The second thing was to rescue her face from that mess of a hairdo. As she crouched in the bathroom, I put her head under the faucet myself so that her hair would uncurl, and placed a towel over her head to keep her shoulders from getting wet. She was wearing a white slip. I had her try on several old dresses (I remembered them from my childhood), for example, the blue dress with flounces and white polka dots, which I associate with Sunday, with festivity, with summer, with pleasure; but either my mother could no longer get into the dress, or the dress seemed too much to me, it assumed too much importance, was too loud, and ended up hiding my mother again, but in an entirely different way than my father had, although in retrospect, all our efforts served only to reveal her further. I combed her blonde shoulder-length hair for a long time so that it would hang absolutely straight on either side of her face, without volume, without form, letting the purity of her features show: her long, straight nose, her narrow jaw, her high cheekbones, and—why not, even if the photograph would be in black and white—her blue eyes. I put a little powder on her—very pale powder, almost white.

Then I led her into the living room, which was bathed in light, a gentle warm light, the enveloping and restful light of summer’s beginning. I placed one of the white armchairs among the green plants, the fig tree, the rubber tree, angled so that the light would fall more gently upon it, and I lowered the blind a little to soften the light’s intensity, which threatened to obliterate and flatten her face. I then removed anything distracting from the field of view, like the plexiglass table where the TV guides lay. My mother was sitting straight up in that armchair in her slip with the towel on her shoulders, waiting, but without any sign of stiffness, for me to finish my preparations. I noticed that her features had already relaxed, and that the little wrinkles that threatened to pinch her mouth had completely disappeared. (For a moment I was able to stop time and old age. Through my love for my mother, I turned back.) There she sat, majestic, like a queen before an execution. (I wonder now if it wasn’t her own execution she was expecting, for once the picture was taken, the image fixed, the process of aging would continue, and this time at a dizzying speed, and at an age between forty-five and fifty, when it so brutally takes hold of a woman. I knew that once the shutter was released she would let herself go with detachment, with serenity, with an absolute resignation, and that she would continue to live with this deteriorating image without trying to recapture it in front of a mirror with beauty creams and masks . . .)

I took her picture. At that moment, she was at the height of her beauty, her face completely smooth and relaxed. She didn’t speak as I moved around her, and there was an imperceptible smile on her lips, undefinable, of peace, of happiness, as if she were being bathed by the light, as if this whirlwind circling slowly around her, at a distance, were the most gentle caress. I believe that at that moment she was happy with the image that I, her son, allowed her to have and that I was capturing without my father’s knowledge. In fact, it’s that: the image of a woman who has always been criticized by her husband, enjoying what she could never have, a forbidden image, and the pleasure between us was even greater as the forbidden burst into pieces. It was a suspended moment, a moment of peace, serene. In some of the pictures, I had her put on a big straw hat folded back, which was for me the young boy’s hat in Death in Venice and which I