Ghost Image (Sun & Moon Classics)

Guibert, Herve

ISBN 10: 1557132674 / ISBN 13: 9781557132673

Published by Sun & Moon Press, 1996

Good paperback, bumped/creased with shelfwear; may have previous owner's name inside. Standard-sized. Seller Inventory # mon0000102517

Synopsis:

"Photographs are not innocent." Guibert writes in one of the most provocative essays in Ghost Image, a collection of critical and autobiographical writings on photography translated for the first time into English by Robert Bononno. "They influence and...betray what is hidden beneath the skin. They weave not only lines and grids, but plots, and they cast spells....They are an impressionable material that welcomes spirits." Guibert, photography critic of La Monde for many years, himself weaves a spell with his many topics and moods, delineated in a continually unpredictable mixture of precise descriptions and poetic musing. Guibert recalls family members through the frozen reality of pictures taken at different times. He offers a compact history of the Polaroid, and informative remarks on noted travel journals resembling photography. He confesses to having betrayed an actress he photographed, and silently ponders whether certain pictures should arouse him, adding his views on the differences between visual erotica and pornography. His own occasional role as model causes ambivalence.
A flurry of other incidents and thoughts - some real, others fantasy - crowd Guibert's pages as he struggles to fathom the essence of that which captures life. In an unforgettable conclusion, through his account of an enigmatic portrait and its strange fate, Guibert finally achieves the union of person and picture he sought. Ghost Image is a collection of beautifully and hauntingly written essays on what is and what lies behind any photograph.

Reviews: This beautiful collection of essays treats photography to a series of snapshot-style studies?quick, candid and exquisitely felt?by an author who knew his subject intimately. Prior to his death from AIDS at age 36, Guibert was both a photo critic for Le Monde and a practicing photographer. These are about the elusiveness of images, starting concretely enough with the portrait of his mother in her majesty that he attempted as a 18-year-old without his father's knowledge. He makes careful arrangements: "I combed her blonde shoulder-length hair for a long time so that it would hang absolutely straight on either side of her face... letting the purity of her features show." Only when the pictures come out of the developing bath black and brutally void, does he realize he never properly wound the film inside the camera. Reflecting the dichotomy of photography itself, Guibert's ruminations are riddled with reflections of death and desire. He is equally fascinated by the medium's twin powers to haunt and to deceive. A police photo of a missing girl invites each passerby to casually recommit the crime of her disappearance in their own mind. As with any album, this collection entails an autobiography, the particular eros of which is explicitly homosexual. "I don't know how to put it more simply... if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory." Occasionally, the writing turns into conversation, as when Guibert addresses some unknown companion. These asides are the only problem in an otherwise perfect read.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Echoes of Roland Barthes haunt this startling collection of autobiographical essays on photography. Guibert was a prolific writer and photographer who died from AIDS at the age of 36 in 1991. Thus, his discussion of photography's dual desire to both record and arrest the body's decay is additionally loaded, as it is shadowed, by his illness and imminent death. The French have a flair for elegantly combining the personal and the critical, and Guibert is no different. He recounts how, when he was 18, he asked his mother (who was middle-aged and terrified of growing old) to pose for him without hair-styling or makeup; at ease in a way she never has been when his father took her picture, she seemed ``at the height of her beauty,'' with ``an imperceptible smile on her lips . . . of peace, of happiness.'' He describes the erotic intensity of the session and the horror of discovering that the film hadn't been loaded right--that he had shot blanks. The absent image hung suspended between him and his mother and they never discussed it, but that dazzling, lost moment further shaped his determination to pursue photography, to understand its peculiar alchemy. Guibert's 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. The photograph doesn't preserve memory, he observes, but replaces it, just as the photographer doesn't own the image he takes but has it returned to him ``like a once familiar object to an amnesiac.'' From the parental framing of the prepubescent body to a film star's obsession with her own iconic manipulation, Guibert uses his personal experiences to develop a lyrical, elegiac celebration of the medium and its implications--a provocative and highly original investigation, sadly truncated by the author's death. (3 photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Ghost Image (Sun & Moon Classics)
Publisher: Sun & Moon Press
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good