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🇦🇹 Austria /Culture & Society

Photographs of Clothes After Sex: Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s “On the Images”

From Der Standard · () German

Translated from German and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth From a news agency Context piece
  • Annie Ernaux and photographer Marc Marie’s book examines desire, chance, bodies, time and transience through their former affair.
  • The book follows Ernaux’s earlier writing about her sex life and gives her former lover a named, active role through his photographs.
  • One photograph of Marie’s penis was excluded because Ernaux did not want to expose it to other viewers.

Annie Ernaux’s latest literary excavation of her love life comes with an unusual collaborator: Marc Marie, the photographer she had an affair with in 2003. This time, the former lover has a real name and is allowed to contribute, or rather to photograph.

Their book, “On the Images,” considers desire and chance alongside female and male bodies, time, and the pain of transience. Marie was newly separated when he became Ernaux’s partner. Ernaux was 63 at the time, before she later became a Nobel Prize winner.

I had sex many times to force myself to write.

· Annie ErnauxA line from her earlier book “The Young Man,” cited to frame the connection between her sexual relationships and her writing.

The book arrives in German after Suhrkamp has already made much of Ernaux’s erotic life available to readers, albeit with considerable delay. Her relationships, passions, obsessions and jealous dramas have increasingly become part of the literary record. At times, the article suggests, it can feel as though these sexual relationships last until they produce a book.

Ernaux herself wrote in “The Young Man”: “I had sex many times to force myself to write.” In the new work, the dynamic changes because the lover is not only the subject of the writing but also the person behind the camera. The first photograph, showing Marie’s erect penis with a drop of semen like a pearl, does not appear. Ernaux did not want to place “him” before unfamiliar eyes.

him

· Annie ErnauxThe article quotes Ernaux’s decision not to expose the photograph of Marie’s penis to unfamiliar viewers.
About this summary

Originally published by Der Standard in German. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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