The Use of Photography recounts a passionate love affair between Annie Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy. The affair took place in different locations and Ernaux describes how, shortly after it began, she 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 still on the table – and how painful it felt to put things back in order afterwards. She went and got her camera, and began to take photographs of the scenes of disarray. When she told Marc Marie what she had done, he said he had felt the same desire. Translated by Alison L. Strayer into English for the first time, The Use of Photography is an extraordinary meditation on eroticism, photography and writing, a major work by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.
About the Author
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Marc Marie was a French photographer and journalist.
Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and Translation, the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, and longlisted for the Prix Albertine. Her translation of The Years by Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2018 French-American Prize, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and awarded the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, honouring both author and translator.
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