Annie Ernaux’s ‘Photojournal’ in Écrire la vie: Photo-Diaristic Archives as a Model of Life Writing

Abstract

In Ecrire la vie (2011), an anthology of her major works to date, Annie Ernaux published for the first time about eighty images of herself and her family; these pictures are inserted in an opening ‘photojournal’, and combined with extracts from the author’s private diary, thus giving direct access to her past life and to the idiosyncrasies of her self. Readers/viewers are compelled to confront the texts and images and to construct their own reading of the pictures, which can also be matched with the numerous descriptions of photographs in Ernaux’s autobiographical works since La Place (1983). In contrast to Les Années (2008), the writer’s narrative attempt to produce a total and impersonal autobiography, this photo-textual assemblage constitutes an alternative material and archival form of life-writing; it constructs a singular temporality and a list-like, serial aesthetic which directly emanate from specific characteristics of the diary and photography.