Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays - meditations,
memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems - and not
a single image. Herve Guibert's brief, literary rumination on
photography was written in response to Roland Barthes' Camera
Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that
canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert's parents and friends,
some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning
through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism,
seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been
missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process,
Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert's particular experience as a
gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his
media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical
aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a
cardboard box of family portraits for clues-answers, or even
questions-about the lives of his parents and more distant
relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed
images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, "I don't even
recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or
great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl."
In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and
how - in writing - he seeks to escape and correct the inherent
limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his
technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet
and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists
across a range of media, Guibert's Ghost Image is a beautifully
written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting
and powerful - a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory,
desire, and photography.
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