The Unclassifiable Talent of Hervé Guibert
Hervé Guibert’s ultimately unclassifiable talent brilliantly evokes the shadows, the moments of dread and paranoia, that are part of the experience of love. Doom lurks everywhere in Guibert’s world, in large part because love, as Guibert expresses it, is synonymous with longing, and what is longing but a pit stop on the way to hurt, loss, and the lover’s need to control the beloved?
Born in 1955, into a middle-class family in a suburb of Paris, Guibert, who wrote about photography in addition to taking pictures himself—he also published more than two dozen books of fiction, autofiction, and essays—was a gay man who came of age during the AIDS epidemic, a time of incalculable devastation. Guibert describes the epoch with what feels like a preternatural calm in his now classic 1990 novel, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” in which we meet some of his friends, thinly disguised, including the philosopher Michel Foucault and the actress Isabelle Adjani. I remember reading about the book when it came out in the U.S. the following year—the year that Guibert died, at age thirty-six, of AIDS-related causes. Some people condemned the work for outing Foucault as a fellow AIDS sufferer. What right did Guibert have to tell someone else’s story? At some point, I read the book, and then I put the memory of reading it away: it was too potent, too sharp a reminder of what I had experienced during those years when quick and slow disasters were all around, and I felt ashamed of my helplessness and relative good health.
But then, about a decade ago, the writers Bruce Hainley and Jennifer Krasinski told me about a video that Guibert had made some months before his death. Titled “Modesty, or Immodesty” (1991), the hour-length work, shot by Guibert himself between June, 1990, and March, 1991, shows the artist going about his daily life in his final months, writing, talking on the phone, bathing, exercising, undergoing a medical procedure, then playing back the footage so that he can witness it, taking a holiday, and finally typing on a word processor, which continues to produce his text after he has moved on. This piece, Guibert’s single work on video, is an extraordinary film of self-dramatization: life and illness as a form of theatre. It is not a brave work—that’s too paltry a word for it. It is a powerful record of the isolating effects of AIDS, and of a patient who is running out of time and holding onto the act of creation as evidence that he has lived. As with “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” I did not want to remember the film after I had seen it; its solitude spoke of universal solitude, all those rooms filled with lost potential and the memory of the dead.
So it was with some trepidation, but also curiosity and not a little excitement, that I began looking at the volumes of Guibert’s photographs that were published recently, in elegant editions, by the Magic Hour Press. “The Only Face” is a version of the catalogue for a show that Guibert had in Paris, in 1984. The images are in black-and-white, and are romantic in a way that reminds one almost immediately of the photographer Duane Michals, another artist who worked with image and text. In the introduction to the original catalogue, Guibert wrote:
Love doesn’t necessarily make a good photograph, but the photographer’s interest, and the intelligence and imagination behind it, can contribute to the making of a picture that interests us. It’s important to remember that Guibert was a very young man when he was taking these photographs, because sometimes the romanticism of his vision draws out a kind of artificiality that feels distinctly Gallic in its love of surface beauty; one longs to go deeper, to be allowed to go deeper, into the image.
The photographs are titled—“The mother,” “The father,” and so on—and the dominant visual theme in the work is the photographer’s fascination with the play of light in black-and-white. Too often Guibert goes for mood, as in “The fiancé” and “Sienna.” In the former, we see a figure shot from the front, draped in tulle. At first it’s not clear what sex the person is, but, looking closer, you can make out black hair across his chest. It’s a self-conscious study in texture, the kind of Photography 101 assignment you’re proud of yourself for having carried to completion, but Guibert’s lyricism topples over into kitsch in “Sienna.” In that picture, we see light pouring through a window. There’s smoke in the light. Is it cigarette smoke, or angels’ breath? A thin, shirtless figure sits in a chair with arms and head bent over a table. Again, it’s not a photograph but an image about photography, and Guibert’s too-romantic love of it.
Guibert’s love of Michals-influenced gay narrative also plays out in a piece called “The friend.” A white male hand rests on a broad, darker-skinned chest. That is all we see, in medium closeup, and the contrasts are obvious—light and dark, older and younger—but the picture stops there; what we are meant to register is not so much the bodies, their stories, as the photographer in the act of becoming one. (Helmut Newton is another influence. In Guibert’s portrait “Agathe,” a wavy-haired young woman looks out at us, her open jacket exposing her small breasts.)
Sometimes, though, Guibert is helped by a subject who works with him to make an emotionally legible picture that succeeds graphically as well. I don’t think I’ll soon forget his terrific portrait “Isabelle,” in which we see Adjani lying on a bench, her face turned to the camera. She wears a light-colored garment; her right arm rests on her belly. Adjani’s dark hair, the openness of her gaze, feels less like a study in grays and blacks than like a photograph about stillness. You can see how in their time together, the time it took to take this picture, Guibert was able to move past his love of the art of photography to the point of understanding it as an instrument of connection.
Like Adjani, the subjects of Guibert’s brilliant book “Suzanne and Louise” are so extraordinary that you can’t look away from them, and neither can the artist. Guibert called this book, originally published in France in 1980 and now available in English for the first time, a photo-novel, and that’s fine, but the category seems too limiting for what “Suzanne and Louise” is: a work as great as Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” and just as chilling. We’re in another black-and-white world, this time in a hôtel particulier in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, where two sisters, Suzanne and Louise, have lived for more than forty years. The fairly reclusive ladies, Guibert’s great-aunts, have had different lives: Louise was a Carmelite nun until she was convinced to leave the order by Suzanne, a widow who was once married to a pharmacist. Suzanne has money, and Louise does not. They share a dog named Whysky, and a marriage of sorts: Suzanne is the dominant figure, and Louise her poor relation who waits on her. The prose in the book is written from the inside; when Guibert was a child, he and his family made weekly visits to these sisters, who ultimately fascinated him enough that he was able to sidestep his overly aestheticized sensibility and let these singular beings speak and act and be in ways that are constantly startling and new. “Five years ago, I proposed to my great-aunts that I make a film about them; I had started writing a script, but their refusals were so categorical that I lost of [sic] all hope of ever making it,” Guibert writes. He was able to take photographs, though, and, as the contact sheets piled up, he decided to print some of the images, “just to see, to show them.” In a book of astonishing acts of intimacy, the most revealing is in a series of pictures that Guibert shot of Louise taking down her hair—her “most intimate thing.” Long ago, a woman would send a missed loved one a photograph of herself taking her hair down. In this case, Louise’s washing of her long gray tresses is less an erotic image than an act of self-dramatization in the theatre of being. It’s not a statement so much as a reckoning, a way of showing love to the young relative behind the camera who refuses to let these women not be in the world and then leave it, forgotten. ♦
