On time, illness and photography

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie's The Use of Photography

Many writers know that in the year of publishing a book, their personal reading falls off a cliff. There are many books and proofs I haven't gotten to, but on a long flight from Seoul - a complicated route that avoided Russian airspace - I read Annie Ernaux's latest work in one fevered sitting. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Opening The Use of Photography under that tiny writing light, surrounded by sleepers, I assumed it would be a deconstruction of photography. If anything, it's devoid of the technical aspects of how we take photos. In alternating chapters, Ernaux and her lover Marc Marie recall a 2003 love affair and a series of images they took after each time they had sex. A partly photographic epistolary form, the pair trained their gaze on the still life of discarded clothing and each wrote about the result.

The urgency, the s…