Ghost Image

Review

Another Guibert. I expected this one to speak a little more to me, as it is the intersection of photography and writing. Little parts of it, especially the brief entry “Contact Sheet” (see note for p75 below) did, and others were worth reading, but maybe had quieter voices. The premise of using words as a method of constituting photographs (the ghost images) in the reader’s mind is interesting; it is what all fiction writing at the least is, of a sort. Stephen King calls writing telepathy. Sometimes the writer strings words together that are outlandish and have nothing to do with anything else, purely because the stringing of them evokes a certain emotion or sensory experience. Other times it is visual description to the nth degree, forcing the image the writer beholds into the reader’s mind (willingly or not). Guibert falls somewhere in the middle. Some of the photographs and paintings referenced speak more to me in Guibert’s words than they do on a computer screen, and some of his words I badly wish I could see printed as a photo. At some point soon I will mindfully go through his photobook The Only Face and I’m curious if I will discover any of these spoken photos in those pages.

Notes

• p22 - If I had photographed it at once, and if the picture had turned out “well” (that is, faithful to the memory of my emotion), it would have become mine. But the act of photographing it would have obliterated all memory of the emotion, for photography envelops things and causes forgetfulness, whereas writing, which it can only hinder, is a melancholy act, and the image would have been “returned” to me as a photograph, as an estranged object that would bear my name and that I could take credit for, but that would always remain foreign to me (like a once familiar object to an amnesiac).
• p53-54 - In this photograph, I was scowling. I still wore a blazer, but my hair was long and curly. I said to myself: It all happened during those ten years. Today, I refuse the memory of the past so as not to completely extinguish my desire to go on living. Did I even want to remember everything that had happened during those ten years? Everything. Too much. This sinister looking face that I had become?
• p75, “Contact Sheet” - Without mentioning the notable disasters that arise from improper settings, incorrect focal lengths, or faulty exposures, the first impulse, the first reflex is one of disappointment: Is that all I saw on these small 35-millimeter rectangles that often cease to have meaning for me? Is this the result of all that tension and gesticulation? The pictures I thought would turn out the best are failures, and those I considered the least promising are often quite good. The camera has gotten the best of me. Once again, it is not equal to my abilities, giving either more or less than what I expected of it. Either I’m a bad technician or it’s a bad mediator.
• p151 - Leaving the backstage of the theater, breaking through the agglutinated mass of admirers, I was neither jealous nor envious, just a little sad, sad from being a body alone moving against the current, solitary and eccentric.
• p153 - “I don’t have the impression that I photographed you a great deal. I certainly photographed you less than I wanted to. Besides, I don’t know why I photograph you…maybe because I can’t caress you, but I never even asked to caress you.” . . .“it’s easier to ask to take your picture than to caress you . . . These pictures are like pledges, or bonds, for my desire: I don’t even know if I’ll ever print them, but if one day, because I am in love, your absence becomes unbearable to me, I know that I’ll be able to turn to this little roll of film and develop your image, and caress you, but without making you shudder, or casting a spell on you.”
• p159 - “I feel completely empty now that I’ve told you this story. It’s my secret. Do you understand?” . . . “Yes, but now your secret has also become my secret. It’s part of me, and I’ll treat it as I do all my secrets—I’ll get rid of it when the time comes. Then it will become someone else’s secret.”