Synopses & Reviews
Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essaysmeditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poemsand not a single image. Hervé Guiberts brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthess
Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guiberts parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed.
Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guiberts particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for cluesanswers, or even questionsabout the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, I dont even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and howin writinghe seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer.
With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guiberts Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerfula unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.
Review
“A lyrical, elegiac celebration of the medium and its implications—a provocative and highly original investigation.” Kirkus
Review
“Quick, candid, and exquisitely felt.”
Review
“Guiberts rhythmic descriptions of his relationship to images at various stages of his life manage to convey the transience of life and memory that the photographer is always struggling to overcome. . . . A lyrical, elegiac celebration of the medium and its implications—a provocative and highly original investigation.”
Review
“Why has no thoughtful publisher translated and published all of Guiberts works, in trim editions, each cover graced with his seraphic image? . . . To get Guiberts full message, which isnt light-years apart from Susan Sontags and Frank OHaras New York-based credos (pay attention, live as variously as possible) but that chose for its transmission not the lyric or the essay but the autofiction, the fragmentary self-articulation, casual as a snapshot, would involve questioning straitened notions of what constitutes a polished piece of writing, or a lifes work, or an autobiography, or a sexuality, or a successful venture—and learning, instead, to appreciate the cadences of catastrophe, of self-excavating improvisation, and of unknowingness. Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guiberts method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guiberts work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.”
Review
“Ghost Image is essential Guibert—an artists penetrating look at his own profession and obsessions. It is animated and validated by prickly sensations and thrusts of thought that occur during composition—an accomplished photographers narrative that exists thanks to the virtuous failures of photos.”
Review
“Excellent examples of Hervé Guiberts talent and style. A French writer and photographer who died from AIDS in 1991 at the age of 36, Guibert drew much of his work from his own life and his love of photography. He was especially interested in the surprising effects photographs can produce on people, not just on the subject and observers but also on the photographer as well.”
Synopsis
Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) may be France's best known author of AIDS narratives. This very personal rumination on photography in partly a response to Barthes’s
Camera Lucida, the most widely taught literary/theoretical text on photography. Guibert combines accounts of his artistic process with memoir, revealing his particular experience and vision of the world. In 63 short meditations and stories, he tries to express what he would have caught in photographs he tried to take but missed through some technical mistake. Guibert explains how he sets up compositions for photographs. He searches through a box of old family snapshots for insights into his relationship with his parents and other relatives. He describes photography as an act of possession, frustration, and exploration.
About the Author
Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was born and worked in Paris. A noted photographer, he also contributed articles on culture to the French newspaper Le Monde and wrote works of fiction and books on photography.Robert Bononno is a freelance translator who lives in New York.
Table of Contents
"I used to dream ... "
Ghost Image
First Love
The Perfect Image
The Erotic Picture
Photo Souvenir (East Berlin)
A Family Photograph
A Fantasy
Inventory of a Box of Photographs
A Possible Photo Sequence for Bernard Faucon
Home Movies
Holography
Identity Photograph I
Identity Photograph II
Photobooth (Florence)
Self-Portrait
The Album
The x-ray
Identification
The Hotel Room
Example of a Travel Photograph
Photographic Writing
Contact Sheet
The Insult
The Camera
The Fetish
The Threat
A Fantasy II
"The majority of your stories ... "
Diffraction
The Rings
Premeditation
The Session
Advice
The Beautiful Image
Suite, Series, Sequence
Pornography
Porno Bis
Red Tape
The Collection
The Fovea
The Bus
Dance
Polaroid
Favorite Photographs
The Article
"Photography has infiltrated your life ... "
A Fantasy III
The Betrayal
The Proof
The Photograph, as Close to Death as Possible
A Fantasy iv
A Cruel Act
Proof by the Absurd
A Memorial for Simple Hearts
T. told me
”
Return to the Beloved Image
The Cancerous Image
Secrets
The Retouching Artist
The Fake
Transparencies
The Pharmacist of Rue Vaugirard