Selected Photographs & Ghost Image
Hervé Guibert
‘A good photograph is not one that captures
or documents a moment, but one that is
faithful to the memory of an emotion.’
- Hervé Guibert
A selection of black-and-white photographs taken by Hervé Guibert between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, combined with the essay collection Ghost Image, offers a unique insight into the work of this French writer, photographer, journalist, and filmmaker. While his photographic work is often associated with portraiture, these pictures capture instead the absence of the body. Faces are missing: in their place, Guibert frames inanimate objects, interiors, and domestic spaces – sites charged with memory and emotion, haunted by the invisible presence of those who once inhabited them. What is central here is precisely what is not there: each image, charged with both love and loss, invites imaginative readings of the people who belong – or once belonged – to these rooms.
The selection as shown here, was part of an original grouping of 32 photographs titled This and More, curated by Anthony Huberman and presented at The Wattis Institute (2022), MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2023) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2023). This current installation presents a further selection that underscores the roles of absence and desire, arranged into a narrative that feels deliberately unresolved – suspended in time, like a freeze-frame of life itself.
‘[this book] is becoming a negative of
photography. It speaks of photography in
negative terms, it speaks only of ghost
images, images that have not yet issued, or
rather, of latent images, images that are so
intimate that they become invisible.’
- Ghost Image, pp.113-114
The delicate force of this series of black-and-white photographs is more intensely felt when considered in relation to Guibert’s broader practice across media; in particular in relation to his writing. Ghost Image, first published in France in 1981 and later translated into English in 1996, continues Guibert’s meditation on absence. Composed as a series of reflections on photography, what is most strikingly absent here are precisely the images themselves. This visible absence stems from the fact that the moments recounted in these texts correspond to episodes Guibert wished he could have photographed but could not. Paradoxically, however, the book feels all the more alive precisely through its absence of photographs: by writing about what is not there, Guibert allows us to see his images all the more clearly.
Special thanks to Christine Guibert and Françoise Morin at Les Douches la Galerie
Text sources:
- MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. Hervé Guibert — This and More. 2023
- KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Hervé Guibert — This and More. 2023.
- Pilgrim, Felix. Hervé Guibert's 'Ghost Image' - Review. 25 Novembre 2020.
Hervé Guibert
°1955, Saint-Cloud, France - 1991, Clamart, France
Hervé Guibert was a French writer and photographer. Born into a middle-class family in Saint-Cloud, a suburb west of Paris, he worked briefly as an actor and filmmaker before becoming a columnist for Le Monde in the late 1970s. Over the course of his short but prolific career, he produced critical essays, screenplays, pamphlets, and intimately autobiographical novels that are now regarded as precursors to the genre of autofiction. Most notably among his body of writing is À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), a novel which played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France toward AIDS. In parallel with his literary practice, Guibert developed an important body of photographic work, conceived in the manner of a diary. Just as in his writings, he practiced a form of autofiction through photography, nourishing his images through his intimacies and the everyday, and finding his main source of inspiration – across all media – in his circle of friends, who, moving from fictional constructs to real subjects, became portraits or fragments of a love discourse. Yet, as the French writer Raymond Bellour observed, “reducing Guibert’s work to what often seems its all too clearly autobiographical component” risks overlooking the deeper core of his practice: an existential reflection that unfolds from the personal into the universal.
Photo: Hervé Guibert. Autoportrait allongé, Rome, 1988 © Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris
Text sources:
- O’Hagan, Sean. “A twisted tale of strange sisters: Hervé Guibert’s photographs of his reclusive great-aunts in 1970s Paris”. The Guardian, 10 November 2024
- Les Douches la Galerie. Hervé Guibert.
- Teyssou, Charles. “How to Dissect God?: Hervé Guibert”. Mousse Magazine, 13 Oct 2020.
FIND OUT MORE:
This and More at KW Berlin / MACRO / The Wattis Institute
Erika Balsom - A Photographic Negative, in “Sidecar”, New Left Review, 14 July 2023.