Hervé Guibert's Ghost Image consists of sixty-three mini-essays, some no more than a page or two, which question what it means to take photographs and what it means to be photographed. The book is diaristic, chronicling both Guibert’s childhood and his day-to-day life in 1970s Paris. As a piece of literature, it often reads as Autofiction, some episodes appearing heightened with an aura of unreality around them which best serve the thoughts and ideas of particular essays. It contains no actual photographs, precisely because it is about moments from Guibert’s life he wanted to photograph but couldn’t. As such, it is an ode to faces lost in crowds, figures glimpsed in alleyways and shop-windows, paths not followed and images not taken.
Perhaps the most affecting essay relates the day in which Guibert's mother, usually shy and awkward in front of a camera, agreed to have her portrait taken. She was forty-five and stood, as we are told, on the threshold between beauty and old age. She allowed her hair, ususally worn up in tight curls, to be taken down, washed and combed by her son. The intimacy of this moment is palpable, and it becomes clear that on this day mother and son were actually collaborating with one another to create a momento of their relationship. However Guibert failed to correctly load the camera and the fruits of their shared endeavour resulted in nothing more than a blank slate of film.
"That blank moment (that blank death? since one can shoot "blanks") remained between my mother and I with the secret power of incest. It had imposed a silence between us. We never spoke about it, and I never photographed her again".
Guibert talks unflinchingly about loss and the elusive, frustrating nature of memory. In doing so, he touches upon why it is we are drawn to taking photographs in the first place.
"[when evoking] a face...sometimes nothing appears that is tangible, nothing but the shape of a nose...nothing but the inflection of a voice...or the colour of hair...nothing more than a very fluid and incomplete image, painful for the effort it requires of us, and in its plea to exist again."
While reading Ghost Image I often had the impulse to google the images Guibert evokes. In Paris we see an elderly pharmacist, known only as "the doctor", stood amongst ancient jars of powders and herbs in his dark, cramped shop. On stage, a Japanese dancer, "his entire body is very white, powdered with white clay" dances with a peacock. On the Île Saint-Louis we glimpse two brothers - one exceptionally tall holding the leash of a spindly grey-hound while his other hand rests on the shoulder of his much smaller brother: "a very gentle, fragile image, an image of kindness, or friendship". Opposite the Gare du Midi "a woman with eyelids swollen from lack of sleep gently [caresses] her man's hair with the bright red tips of her fingers", while on the Isle of Elba four young boys stand in a row on a stone embankment beneath a blue, stormy sea. "Their alignmet, the equidistance that seperates them on this thin strip of beach, is perfect". Again, these portraits are un-googleable. Such moments appear doubly ephemeral, and we feel an almost double sense of loss when thinking about them, as they have never existed in photographic form. They are both lost forever and immortalised by Guibert, who was to die only ten years after Ghost Image's publication in 1991 of AIDS.
I was also reminded that Guibert wrote well before the dawn of the internet; before Instagram, Photoshop, camera phones and filters became a feature of everyday life. One episode feels both of its time and suprisingly modern. One of his photographer friends preparing for an exhibition brings a selection of prints to a retouching artist because some of the negatives are slightly scratched. A model in one of the photos is covered from head to toe with freckles. When the photo is returned to the photographer the scratch has gone, along with all of the model's freckles. The retoucher's actions are explained by the fact her clients are usually advertising and fashion magazines.
Yet the methods for achieving this air-brushed "perfection" sound positively antiquated nowadays. The retoucher works on bromide papers, adds colours, chemicals and methodically cleans the surface of each print with a piece of cotton soaked in alcohol. In describing this process of erasure, Guibert gives us a portrait of a profession which has itself been all but lost. Then again, in the present-day we are all retouchers, cropping and curating images of our screen-selves and screen-lives which match perfection as we understand it and seek to define it.
In a tantalising essay entitled 'The Session', the roles are reversed when Guibert has his portrait taken by another photographer, referred to mysteriously as 'D.S.' Guibert goes to his apartment and finds himself enclosed in a black satin straightjacket. Above is a skylight "through which I can see the Eiffel Tower, and suddenly...my unobstructed gaze and that light, too gray, too bright, release an incessant flood of tears that bathe my face". What follows sounds like a more sinister version of the famous scene between David Hemmings and Veruschka in Antonioni's 'Blow-Up'. "The photographer circles around me; bending over me, he does not speak...I'm like a child being tortured...The camera prepares to sever my head with blades of shadow and present it - as if to Salome - not on a gold platter, but on a sheet of photographic paper". We are reminded of the complex power-dynamics that form when a photograph is being taken, and how, when in front of a camera, a model's emotional openness and vulnerability can make the whole experience feel like an assault of some kind, blurring the lines between catharsis and violence. After reading this mini-essay, you can't help wishing to see the photos themselves and Guibert's christ-like face bathed in tears. In writing about the photo-shoot, Guibert makes us aware there is a voyeur in all of us, attracted to the deific suffering of others, suffering which becomes palatable, not to mention beautiful, when presented as a piece of art.
Occasionally, Guibert writes about images we do have access to: photographs of the French actress Isabelle Adjani, for example, who is referred to simply by the letter "I.".
Guibert writes how militantly she controlled her public image, demanding immediate access to contact sheets and negatives after photoshoots. Still, such behaviour is nothing new, and plenty of savvy Hollywood stars, from Mae West to Marilyn Monroe, have also had a hand in curating their public personas.
"As soon as she was alone, she studied them with a mixtue of fear and greed, destroying the majority of them."
He was conflicted by these images. At first he was pleased she agreed to be photographed sans makeup, then he was terrified they wouldn't come out properly because his light metre wasn't working (something he was too scared to tell her at the time). The images came out well, but, feeling indifferent towards them, Guibert sold them to a magazine for 5,000 francs. This upset Adjani and so, filled with remorse, he bought them back from the magazine. Perhaps Guibert felt unsatisfied by the fact his work served both personal and commercial purposes. They are candids which record a blossiming friendship with Adjani, as well as semi-staged, editorial-esque images of an actress being (or perhaps playing) herself.
Like the ghost images of Guibert's mother perched on the threshold between youth and middle age, Adjani seems to occupy a liminal space somewhere between the freedom of youth and the self-imposed prison of fame. Rather appropriately, the images were taken at the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes, which was renovated not long after Adjani's photoshoot.
Above all, Ghost Image is a thematically kaleidoscopic investigation into the roles images play in helping us make sense of the world. Guibert also reflects on the magical, almost supernatural way in which photographs present their subjects as both living and dead. Towards the end of the book, we learn that indigenious Americans have regarded the taking of photographs as akin to murder. If that is so, then this book feels all the more alive for its absence of photographs. We put the book down acutely aware of the beauty of Guibert's language, and marvel at his ability to conjure people, places and things that will forever exist in a realm beyond the 4x4 frame of a photograph, computer or phone screen. In writing about what is not there, we see his images all the more clearly. Ultimately, Guibert casts a spell in which his eyes become our eyes, and what a beautiful world it is we have the privilege of seeing.
