The Use of Photography

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
**Serialized in The New Yorker**

An account of Annie Ernaux’s love affair with journalist Marc Marie while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their combined project to document images and memories.

Includes 14 color still-life photographs by the authors.
A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

“A must-read for lovers of words, images, and Ernaux herself. So. . . everyone?”—Jessie Gaynor, LitHub

“Annie Ernaux has long foregrounded physical and emotional sensations as the building blocks of her autobiographical writing. However, it is in The Use of Photography where the connection between the body and subjectivity most powerfully emerges.”—Lisa Connell in French Forum

“These photos, in which the bodies are absent, and the eroticism is only represented by the abandoned clothes, were a reminder of my possible, permanent absence.”—Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie met in January 2003 and became lovers almost immediately. A short time later, he accompanied her to the Institut Curie, where she was having surgery for breast cancer. A deep bond formed between Annie and Marc precisely during this time of great uncertainty within Ernaux as to whether she would live or die from the cancer.

Early in their affair, Ernaux found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place, and the remains of their last meal of the evening before still on the table. The two lovers began to take still life photographs, and to write. Their efforts to save the fleeting beauty of these moments were, as Ernaux would describe later in an interview, “material proof of what had happened there, of love.”

The Use of Photography is a defining work in Ernaux’s career, leading directly to the book that would come next, her masterpiece, The Years.

“Annie Ernaux’s work presents a breathtakingly frank, fearless, many-sided account of the female experience during the past century.”—Liesl Schillinger, Oprah Daily

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Now an Award-Winning Film “‘Happening’ recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy….It feels urgently of the moment.” —The New York Times A personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. A masterpiece. “[T]he story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.” —The Guardian “[N]ot a confession but a kind of personal epistemology. … One way to read Ernaux’s book is as an attempt to understand that opaque, painful, essential process of ‘becoming.’” —The New Yorker “[T]he little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment—Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.” —Washington Post “Annie Ernaux concisely charts telling moments during adolescence love, marriage, career, and motherhood …” —St. Louis Post Dispatch

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“Ernaux courageously bears witness… to the fierce persistence of family love.” —Washington Post “[A] tender, tough and moving tribute to her mother’s life and death. . . Ernaux attempts to explain—or, perhaps, merely to understand—the complex roots and blossoms of a mother/daughter relationship.” —Washington Times A striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Taking the form of journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernau’s cold observation in A Man’s Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. “The careful, unflinching specificities of Shame give voice to a resonant and universal truth; and Ernaux’s particular discomfort is, most profoundly, that of being human.”—New York Times Book Review

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Description
“Gripping. . . . Nobel prize winning writer Annie Ernaux’s recounts her fervent love affair with A., a man 30 years her junior.” —Nylon An account of Annie Ernaux’s love affair with journalist Marc Marie while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their combined project to document images and memories. Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux. This boxed set includes 13 books written by 2022 Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux published by Seven Stories Press, plus a limited edition poster!

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seven Stories Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 1, 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 164421413X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1644214138
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.43 x 8.22 inches