Read an Excerpt
A Box of Photographs
By ROGER GRENIER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30831-9
Chapter One
A Box of Photographs
TALKING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY is like paying off an old debt. I imagine some cynic saying, "Talk about photography all you like, but spare me the clichés." I promise to try.
An anecdote to start. I knew an American, Marjorie Ferguson, whose family was straight out of a Henry James novel—very rich people who hired a fellow named George Eastman to tutor their children. One day this Eastman announced that he had invented a new, practical kind of camera, sure to be widely used. He asked them to invest. They refused. Eastman went elsewhere to finance his device, and the name he gave it sounds just like the click of a shutter: Kodak.
The story brings to mind that of the unfortunate young man remembered by the engineer Charles-Louis Chevalier, a famous optician from the early nineteenth century who later introduced Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre to each other. Chevalier constructed camera obscuras equipped with optical devices that were already quite elaborate. The young man came to see him to find out how much it would cost him to order one. Alas, they were far too expensive for him. It was really too bad, said the young man, because he needed better equipment to perfect his invention. "What kind of invention, exactly?" Chevalier asked. "I've managed to fix images from the camera obscura onto paper," the young man said. Then he placed an image of Paris on the table. Could you call it a photograph? Or a photograph before photography? It occurred to the optician that this young man had found what so many others were looking for. Then the poor wretch left his shop. Chevalier never saw him again.
But doesn't photography really begin with the first child who saw the sky, the trees, the prairies reflected in a drop of water? Or with Aristotle, who, during an eclipse, pierced a tiny hole through a wall of a darkened room so he could observe a slice of the sun cut off by the moon? Fixing the image afterwards was merely a chemical detail.
In 1903, Alfred Jarry published a hilarious, blasphemous article in Le Canard sauvage, the satirical newspaper he wrote for with Franc-Nohain and Charles-Louis Philippe. He described the Passion of Christ as a hilly bicycle race. In his tale, Veronica (vera icon, the true image) was the first photojournalist.
It would be an endless task to account for all the phenomena that seemed to announce photography, so fervently was it anticipated. Nadar said of the illustrator Constantin Guys, who drew the Crimean War in situ, "He discovered the snapshot before we did."
By 1852, a photographer had appeared as the hero of a novel. He was the young daguerreotypist Holgrave, in Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables.
On August 13, 1850, Delacroix noted in his diary that astronomers in Cambridge had photographed the sun, the moon, and the stars, in particular the star Alpha in the constellation Lyra: "Since the star in the daguerreotype took twenty years to cross the space that separated it from the earth, it follows that the ray of light that fixed itself on the plate had left its celestial sphere long before Daguerre discovered the procedure by which we've just become the masters of that star."
Writing about the Salon of 1859, Charles Baudelaire cursed a society so vulgar that it was ready for the new invention of photography to replace art: "From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate." And yet Nadar, Charles Neyt, and Etienne Carjat have left for posterity the face of the author of Flowers of Evil and, better still, his tormented soul. For once, Baudelaire got it wrong. Photography can be an art.
It is true that people soon started photographing everything and anything: slaughterhouses, dissections, war, babies, loose women. The curiosity of this "artificial eye," as Niépce called it, seemed insatiable. "All, even horror, to enchantment turns," as Baudelaire once said. May he forgive me for quoting him in connection with the invention he so abhorred. Except when he needed it to invent a metaphor. In Morale du Joujou [moral of the plaything] he compares the small brain of a child to a camera obscura capable of reducing life's great drama to the size of a toy.
Alongside route 6, near Chalon-sur-Saône, there's a monument commemorating Nicéphore Niépce, a native son. Before the freeway was built I had a friend who never traveled south without stopping his car to take a little nap right in the shadow of that slab of stone.
In my autobiographical novel, Years in Ambush, my hero is a photographer. He might have been a pianist in a bar. Two of my fantasies.
Posing for Portraits
EVEN BEFORE THE INVENTION of the Kodak, middle-class people and rich people, beautiful people and ugly ones, were wild about getting their portraits taken to record their family memories. The need had always existed, even thousands of years before the invention of photography. Take that young woman described by Pliny the Elder. When her man went off to war she drew the contours of his shadow on the wall of their room. She kept a faithful image.
Anne Garréta and Jacques Roubaud have written a novel together, Eros mélancolique, in which photography plays a central but strange role. As their story unfolds, they ponder: "How did people see faces, expressions, before photography? How did they capture the gesture, the fleeting expression, the furtive movement of desire or defiance that a sudden look, a flash, barely intimated? Could they, in all decency, take the time to scrutinize faces and bodies? Even discreetly? Didn't those pliant expressions elude them? Sleep or death alone fixed them long enough so they could seize them, so they could take possession."
One of the first uses of the new invention was, naturally, the portrait. In the notes on Paris by a fictional Cincinnati business man named Graindorge, Hippolyte Taine imagines a vast state apparatus, almost a ministry, where newly married couples are required to have their photographs taken. The number and variety of poses are determined by the wife's dowry. You could also get your photograph taken—or rather be photographed—on your deathbed. Victor Hugo, for example, his beard and hair in a halo of light, photographed by Nadar.
The oldest family photographs in my possession, dating back to the 1890s, are the only traces of ancestors I never knew. No one is smiling. Perhaps, for the elderly, it was because they had lost their teeth. Then again, posing for a portrait was a kind of ceremony, imbued with solemnity. Still, I'd like them better if they looked friendlier.
A colored photo of my paternal grandfather is signed "Auguste Gros, professor of drawing and painting." Auguste Gros took over the shop of a man named Stéphano at 39 boulevard de Strasbourg. He was a neighbor. My grandfather operated a printing press at number 43. I didn't know him. He died during the First World War, paralyzed from rheumatism, after retiring to his native village, Attichy, on the banks of the Aisne—right on the front lines. He called himself Joseph Grenier but Joseph was his second name. His first was Barthélemy. Rereading "Angélique" in Gérard de Nerval's Les filles du feu, I discovered that the principal holiday in certain villages in that region is the festival of Saint Barthélemy. "It was for that day especially that they founded the great archery prizes," wrote Nerval. Perhaps the first name of my grandfather, who was born in 1845, ten years before Nerval's death, came from that festival. I don't think it had any connection with the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants.
One can imagine Joseph saw the region with much the same tenderness as the man whose poignant photograph was taken by Nadar only three days before his death. What distress in Nerval's eyes! The picture from January 1855 shows a man who seems close to us, a friend we would like to console for all the offenses life has inflicted upon him.
Anyone who owned a store had his picture taken in front of it. The grandfather in front of his printing shop; his neighbor—my godmother—in front of her shoe shop; my father and mother in front of a series of optical shops in Paris, Caen, Pau, Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Tarbes....
Two photos, a portrait and a snapshot, are all I know about my first cousin Fernand Lipman.
My aunt Marthe and her husband posed for Louis, "Photographer of the Porte Saint-Martin." Martha's husband is wearing white gloves, a white bow tie, and a pocket handkerchief, also white. He would die in the First World War, pulverized by a shell.
The photos that came back from the war were not numerous, nor were they very remarkable. A small dog, probably a fox terrier, adopted by the men and named Crapouillot—mortar. When peace came, people scoured the countryside, knocking boldly at farmhouse doors: "Any deaths here?" They would ask for a photograph of the dead soldier and take it away, enlarge it, put it in a fancy frame, then sell it back—a portrait to hang on the wall, forever.
My father emerging from the air gunner's seat in a plane, because he had started in the infantry and ended up an aviator. Later, he can be seen in various veterans' ceremonies, and even under the Arc de Triomphe, in front of the eternal flame. But most of photographs of him show him fly fishing.
When he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, André Kertész photographed a group of four soldiers sitting side by side on a latrine set up in the middle of a field. These makeshift toilets were called feuillées, from leaves, as in a leafy refuge.... They lowered their britches and, as the saying goes, satisfied the call of nature, taking their time. One of those four soldiers was killed in combat. Since he had no other photo of his comrade, Kertész offered this one as a memento to his widow.
How many wedding pictures, how many couples pose on that fatal day! The photographs have lasted much longer than many unions. Or else they perpetuate the life of the couple beyond death.
Friends of our family, a father, mother, and daughter, were eager to pose before the lens, though these good people were uglier than anyone we knew. They never failed to give us the latest versions of these hideous portraits.
When we talk about photographs collected throughout an entire life, we frequently say that they're stuff ed into a shoe box. In our house the shoe box was filled with postcards. Those cards were my travel diaries. I never tired of exploring the box.
Receiving a photograph was considered an honor. For lovers, getting your beloved to give you a photo was the first step along the path to seduction. And when you broke up, it only added insult to injury to return the letters and the photos! Photographing someone was almost like possessing part of them. They say you have to capture someone's expression to take a successful photograph. To take, to capture—these aren't innocent words. Even before the attempt at seduction, getting a girl to let you take her photo and keep a copy is like getting a charm or a fetish—something precious. Brassaï showed to what extent Proust was under the spell of photography. He asked people who interested him to give him their photos. If they refused, Proust insisted—he'd go so far as to steal. Apparently his mother and the rest of his family shared this obsession. A photo allows you to dream endlessly—when his charming old friend the Marquise de Brantes sent him her photo, Proust's imagination, assisted by his memory, touched it up, varying the hairstyle and the dress. Proust's passion culminates in Swann's Way with the famous scene of voyeurism—the narrator spying through an open window, just as Mademoiselle Vinteuil's girlfriend is about to spit on old Monsieur Vinteuil's photo.
Susan Sontag wrote, "in its simplest form, we have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing, a possession which gives photographs some of the character of unique objects."
Even a man as ugly as the aged Schopenhauer was constantly having photographs taken of himself, which he hung all around him, analyzed, and discussed.
On the other hand, there are people who hate posing for photos. Balzac felt "a vague apprehension" when he was photographed. Henri Michaux had the impression that a part of him was being stolen. They are like Erasme in Hoff mann's tale. Giuletta persuades him to give her his reflection—the image that appears in the mirror: "Leave me at least your reflection, my beloved! I will guard it preciously, it will never leave me." Erasme is surprised: "How could you keep my reflection? It is inseparable from my person. It accompanies me everywhere and comes back to me on every calm and pure body of water, on all the polished surfaces." Then, despairing over their separation, he ends up acquiescing: "If I have to leave, may my reflection stay in your possession forever and for all eternity."
The American photographer Lisette Model locked up her photos at night, so their souls didn't come out to haunt her.
When we keep a lot of photos of the same person at different ages, we end up noticing expressions and gestures that endure from childhood through old age, and that make us say, "that's him, that's absolutely her," as if there might have been some doubt. In Italy, it is customary to announce a death by sending out a little handbill, which always includes a portrait of the deceased, a preliminary version of the photograph that is set into the tombstone. It is posted on walls in the person's neighborhood.
Sometimes we are frustrated by the lack of photos. Why is there only one rather unflattering photo of Flannery O'Connor? For years, there was only a single photo available of Réjean Ducharme, the reclusive and mysterious writer from Quebec. His editors kept retouching it to make him look older, to keep pace with the passage of time.
Baby Box
IN CAEN, RIGHT after the first world war, my father became great friends with a photographer who called himself Gheorge, a drinking buddy, probably the first in a series of bad influences. In return we got portraits on card stock, the typical kind, such as a naked baby—me—posing on a furry white rug.
That was just the beginning. Each of our lives was punctuated by portraits taken in a photographer's studio, either alone, or in a couple, or with the family. We gave copies of these artistic portraits as gifts to close friends and family. Their dignity, their quasi-official character, bore no relation to and in no way interfered with the practice of amateur photography, accessible to all and becoming more and more widespread.
My parents' profession put us in an ambiguous situation. They were opticians, and opticians often added a photo-printing service to their main business. That was the case in the store they owned in Caen. They even gave demonstrations of a new amateur movie camera, the Pathé Baby. The demonstration included a little film, The Recalcitrant Donkey, which delighted me (I was two or three years old) and which I recommended to everyone who came into the projection room. The recalcitrant donkey—perhaps a symbol, my totem. My mother found the clients who had their film developed annoying (she used a more vulgar term). They asked too many questions; they wanted to know why their pictures didn't turn out, were too dark, were too light. They wasted her time. When my parents left Caen to reestablish their business in Pau, they had no desire to include a photo service.
Even so, in their optical shop you could find a stereoscope with its collection of double photos that allowed you to see an image in three dimensions. They used it to treat cross-eyed children. I doubt it was very effective.
As for photography, that was the neighbor's business. A man named Jové, an artist and a bohemian who did a bit of everything, moved into the shop next door. In Pau in those days, no party, no ball, no sporting event, no official ceremony took place without him. He also published brochures and a sort of magazine. He was at once a reporter, an artist, and a shopkeeper. Strangely, we never had much to do with him. And when we needed to have our pictures taken, we went elsewhere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Box of Photographs by ROGER GRENIER Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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