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

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man’s Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl’s Story, A Woman’s Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, A Man’s Place, and The Young Man.

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 for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Prix littéraire France-Québec. She lives in Paris.