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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Ghost Image

Hervé Guibert

Translated from the French by Robert Bononno

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Besides writing fiction and personal essays, Hervé Guibert devoted his tragically brief life to the understanding of photography and the elusive nature of images recorded by the camera. To this gifted French photographer, who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 36, photographs were objects of wonder and mystery, even possessing a touch of the supernatural.

“Photographs are not innocent,” Guibert writes in one of the most provocative essays in Ghost Image, a collection of critical and autobiographical writings on photography translated here for the first time. “They influence and...betray what is hidden beneath the skin. They weave not only lines and grids, but plots, and they cast spells.... They are an impressionable material that welcomes spirits.” Guibert, photography critic of Le Monde for many years, himself weaves a spell with his many topics and moods, delineated in a continually unpredictable mixture of precise descriptions and poetic musings. In an unforgettable conclusion, through his account of an enigmatic portrait and its strange fate, Guibert finally achieves the union of person and picture he sought. Ghost Image is a collection of beautifully and hauntingly written essays on what is and what lies behind any photograph.