La Disparition des lucioles

Nothing is more serious than the act of photography. For a writer, to engage in it is to sign, each time, a “departure of pride.” It also means abandoning, at every turn, the simulacra and strategies, escaping the constraints of persuasion, the obligatory subtlety of transitions. I would even add: the notion of skill—if I weren’t certain of the opposite, certain that this is yet another illusion we add to the debate each day in a different form. Every gain in freedom (and each photographic snapshot achieves one) goes hand in hand with an increase in skill. That’s what makes style. And it is the vertigo felt in their shared momentum, in the jolt they make above the void, that defines, of course, this art. Hence the importance placed throughout this book—through approaches deliberately as diverse as the essay, the interview, fiction, the personal journal, or a series of annotated photographs serving as reflective diagrams—on the photographic act itself, that moment of frenzied sensation that literally says this: every photograph is an intelligence exhausted by a light. Fireflies are gradually disappearing, confined to a few occasional refuges of nature. But while these charming creatures of light become rarer, we, the photophores, take over. The making of photographs leaves nothing in the dark—especially not the moment of pure madness that the shutter click harbors. Faced with the gravity of such certainties, the writer that I am is cast back into solitude, into anxiety, into the half-light of duration. But also into beauty, circulating between them and him, which made the journey worthwhile. Each photograph repeats Proust’s sentence: “We said: after, death; after, illness; after, ugliness; after, humiliation.” We shall see. — Denis Roche