Used and loved objects have the uncanny ability to return us to the emotion we held the last time we interacted with them. Consider Pablo Neruda's impossible love of little things, clearly a bespoke longing filled by memory, or Italo Calvino's collection of collectors of sand. We keep and hold these things and cannot possibly discard them. They can be as simple as a dried bloom or a beach stone found and carried home for no reason save we could not bear not to.

If objects are memory triggers, then photographs of objects, especially transient ones, are a close second. Around 2003, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux (Born September 1, 1940) kept a photo journal of the discarded "tangled clothes that had been thrown all over" after sex with her lover journalist Marc Mare. The images are a testament to the human desire to exist in object-triggered memory: "As if making love were not enough and we needed to preserve a material representation of the act."

"Clothing and shoes are scattered all the way down an entrance hall..."

Clothing and shoes are scattered all the way down an entrance hallway with big pale tiles. In the foreground, on the right, is a red jumper or shirt and black tank top that appear to have been torn off and turned inside out in the same movement, resembling a low-cut bust with the arms cut off. A white label is clearly visible on the tank top. Futher on is a pair of curled-up jeans with a black belt attached. To the left of the jeans, the red lining of a red jacket is spread out like a cloth for cleaning the floor. On top of that, a pair of blue-chequered boxer shorts and a white bra, one of whose straps is stretching out towards the jeans. Behind, a men’s boot lies on its side next to a rumpled blue sock. Standing far apart and perpendicular to each other are two black high-heeled pumps. Even further away, protruding from under the radiator, is the black splotch of a jumper or skirt. On the other side, next to the wall, is a small black-and-white heap, impossible to identify. In the background we can discern the coat-rack and the bottom of a trench coat whose belt is dangling down. The light of a flash illuminates the scene, whitening the tiles and the radiator, and making the leather of the pump we see in profile shimmer.

I imagine Ernaux's first act is a forensic gaze detailing the objects visible,  their positions and physical distress. Then in the spirit of writing and feeling, she connects with the objects and layers in a subjective memory. Susan Sontag noted that photographs "owe their existence to loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject." By interacting with the subject matter thus, it is as if Ernaux returns to the memorial eroticism of lovemaking as she remembers the detritus of such lovemaking.

"This photo was taken Monday morning, shortly before we left the room..."

The photo was taken on Monday morning, shortly before we left the room. It’s not a postcoital landscape, just the image of a room where you’ve lived for three days and that you will probably never see again and whose details will mostly be forgotten. Just as I’ve forgotten almost everything – except where the bed stood in relation to the window and the television – and the room where I stayed with Z. in this same hotel in February 1986, and two months later, my mother suddenly died. That she was still alive when I first came to this hotel seems to me incredible – that means there was a time when I could see her, hear her voice, touch her, when she wasn’t there above me. I can’t imagine that time. Maybe it’s because M. also stayed at the Hôtel Amigo in 2001, when he was mad with grief over the death of his own mother, three months earlier. I can’t picture us in the same place, me with my mother alive and he with his mother dead, whereas their deaths are fourteen years apart, and there is such a vast expanse of my mother’s absence behind me.

In 2022 Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory." She is a memorialist, an 'intimatist,' a pinhole soul-barer of excruciatingly intense moments. Following her award, many of us scampered to the bookshops to see for her love and pain cauterised by the pen and camera. 

"It was already very hot, the summer to follow will be that of the 'great heatwave'..."

There’s always a detail in the photo that grabs the eye, a detail more moving than others – a white label, a stocking snaking across the tiles, a lone sock rolled in a ball, a bra with its cups lying flat on the parquet, as if on display in a shop window. Here it’s the white mules in front of the French window. It is already very hot, the summer to follow will be that of the ‘great heatwave’ and when it’s over thousands of old people will have died and been buried, even on Sundays, but for the time being, it was simply the most magnificent summer we had seen for a long time.

When Ernaux notes "There's always a detail in the photo that grabs the eye, a detail more moving than others..." she's ascribing to what philosopher Roland Barthes called the "punctum:" an elevating object whose "mere presence changes my reading; I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value." 

The images without the text are quite fascinating. Items are disheveled, upturned, knocked down and sitting askew. There is a suggested movement, commotion, and even violence. This next one includes scattered papers, a tumbled vase, and a menacing electrical socket (untouched, we relax)  - the preciousness of objects completely disregarded in the rush of lust and love. 

"This one shoes only the objects that we knocked off the desk without noticing..."

From Ernaux's confession, we learn these were "objects we knocked off the desk without knowing." As we might have imagined, but how? Ernaux primed our erotic (vulgar?) imaginations to ascertain the rest.

This photo is one of a group of three taken the same evening, in the same room. Unlike the two others, which show the chaos of the discarded clothes, this one shows only the objects that we knocked off the desk without noticing. We had dined at the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, beneath the room where Van Gogh had once lain dying, whose owner had the thoughtful habit of showing guests around, free of charge, after they had eaten the succulent five-hour leg of lamb and a creamy chocolate mousse.

Of all the crude, loud and pictures included in Ernaux's set, this one stands in subtly. Cast-off clothes seem to slide under the bed, is that shame? Or my own projection as a voyeur? Like gazing upon Tracy Emin's "My Bed," I find myself becoming distastefully intimate with their tasteful intimacy. Or is it sorrow? Sorrow for things left and discarded...like we might be.

"It is a very spare photo..."

It is a very spare photo, almost entirely filled by a pale green carpet on which the vacuum cleaner has left trails going in all directions. The light from an invisible window forms a white gully. At the back of this milky green sea, in the open doorway, is a dark cluster with two pale splotches in the centre and two men’s loafers with a gap in between. One sits on top of something blue. In the foreground on the left, a large section of white damask bedspread spills down in folds, like a curtain. At the bottom of the bedspread are two tangled scarves, one multicoloured, the other two-toned. A third scarf, beige and wound around itself, falls limply from the bed like a piece of rope.

Have you ever scrambled to hold that fleeting dream after morning's consciousness? How do we preserve waking dreams? Photography is an act of preservation and containment of the least ephemeral things. But ultimately, we know, as does Ernaux, that such a grasp is futile; intimacy does not have a past state; it merely transpires into memory. As she says, "a form of innocence has been lost."

We continue to take photos. It is an activity that can go on indefinitely since no two scenes are ever the same. Its only limits are those of desire. But it seems to me that we no longer view the spectacle we discover in the way we did before. We no longer feel the pain that drove us to make a record of the scene in the first place. Taking the photo is no longer the last thing we do. It’s part of our writing process. A form of innocence has been lost.

Ernaux's The Use of Photography is such a strong book, written from a strong mind and body (despite Ernaux's concurrent chemo and radiation treatments) possessed of tension, love, warmth, and fear. Vulnerability. The key to entering her literary world is to divulge the same.  A pricy admission, but worth it.