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Proust in the Power of Photography Hardcover – Illustrated, December 1, 2001
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Drawing on his own experience as a photographer and author, Brassaï discovers a neglected aspect of Proust's interests, offering us a fascinating study of the role of photography both in Proust's oeuvre and in early-twentieth-century culture. Brassaï shows us how Proust was excessively interested in possessing portraits of his acquaintances and how the process by which he remembered and wrote was quite similar to the ways in which photographs register and reveal life's images. This book-beautifully translated by Richard Howard-features previously obscure photographs from Brassaï's High Society series and offers a rare glimpse into two of France's most fascinating artistic minds.
- Print length176 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
- Publication dateDecember 1, 2001
- Dimensions7.78 x 6.31 x 0.66 inches
- ISBN-100226071448
- ISBN-13978-0226071442
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From the Inside Flap
Drawing on his own experience as a photographer and author, Brassaï discovers a neglected aspect of Proust's interests, offering us a fascinating study of the role of photography both in Proust's oeuvre and in early-twentieth-century culture. Brassaï shows us how Proust was excessively interested in possessing portraits of his acquaintances and how the process by which he remembered and wrote was quite similar to the ways in which photographs register and reveal life's images. This book-beautifully translated by Richard Howard-features previously obscure photographs from Brassaï's High Society series and offers a rare glimpse into two of France's most fascinating artistic minds.
From the Back Cover
Drawing on his own experience as a photographer and author, Brassaï discovers a neglected aspect of Proust's interests, offering us a fascinating study of the role of photography both in Proust's oeuvre and in early-twentieth-century culture. Brassaï shows us how Proust was excessively interested in possessing portraits of his acquaintances and how the process by which he remembered and wrote was quite similar to the ways in which photographs register and reveal life's images. This book-beautifully translated by Richard Howard-features previously obscure photographs from Brassaï's High Society series and offers a rare glimpse into two of France's most fascinating artistic minds.
About the Author
Richard Howard, a professor at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, is an award-winning poet and translator. His translations include books by Gide, Cocteau, Giraudoux, De Beauvoir, Barthes, Cioran, and Proust, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, for which he received the American Book Award.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Proust in the Power of Photography
By BrassaiUniversity of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2001 BrassaiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0226071448
1 Birth of a Passion
Adjoining the family house in Illiers, a small one-story pavilion overlooked the garden. Through the little colored windowpanes, the ?ltered light fell on Indian matting, on carved coconuts, on rattan furniture, on hookahs and water pipes. This structure was the lair of Uncle Amiot, who, after having lived in Africa for years, had attempted to reconstruct a colonial atmosphere.
Like Monsieur Abert, the character in Jean Santeuil whom he directly inspired, Jules Amiot must have spent long hours pondering his youth and his mysterious souvenirs, studying photographs as he reclined on his chaise longue. In a piece published in La Revue blanche in 1893 (and later included in Pleasures and Regrets), Proust had already evoked his uncle in the features of a retired captain who, in old age, shut himself up in a tiny house where he too lived only for his memories, as if the world around him no longer existed. From time to time he would open a huge box full of letters, pressed ?owers, and, especially, photographs faded and torn despite every precaution, like those relics consumed by the very piety of the faithful: handled too often, too often kissed.
Was young Marcels passion for photography awakened in Uncle Juless pavilion? Quite possibly. He very early associated photography with a vanished past, with nostalgia, with the melancholy delights of memory.
Proust also inherited this passion from his mother. If the family iconography was so rich, it was because Madame Proust took care to register her childrens features at every stage of their lives. Hence, between their tenth and twelfth years, Marcel and his brother Robert were photographed four times. Betw een Paris and Illiers, Madame Proust would stop at Chartres for sittings. In those days, a visit to the photographer was quite a business, and arrangements for it were almost as complicated as the preparation of a patient for a surgical operation. Appropriate clothes and proper coiffure were discussed en famille. Not content with merely dressing in their best clothes before formally posing for posterity, subjects got themselves up in veritable disguises, hats and other garments never worn before and never to be worn again. Of course head and arm clamps were no longer needed in Prousts day, but one still posed for long minutes sitting on odd chairs or standing alongside strange columns in a setting which belonged only to the universe of portrait photographers.
Lewis Carroll, himself a fervent photographer, has described a posing session in a parody of Longfellow entitled Hiawathas Photographing; here, ?rst of all, is the camera of rosewood, / made of sliding, folding rosewood. The photographer opened out the hinges, / pushed and pulled the joints and hinges, / till it looked all squares and oblongs, / like a complicated ?gure / in the Second Book of Euclid. Finally he settled the camera on a tripod, vanished under the black cloth, and extending his hand, exclaimed: Be motionless, I beg you! It is the family of the Governor, the Father that is to be immortalized, and each of its members offers to assume ingenious poses. The father suggested velvet curtains / looped about a massy pillar; / and the corner of a table, / of a rosewood dining-table. / He would hold a scroll of something, / hold it ?rmly in his left-hand; / he would keep his right-hand buried / (like Napoleon) in his waistcoat; / he would contemplate the distance / with a look of pensive meaning / as of ducks that die in tempests. His wife presented herself dressed beyond description: / dressed in jewels and in satin / far too gorgeous for an empress / . . . / holding in her hand a bouquet / rather larger than a cabbage. / All the while that she was sitting, / still the lady chattered, chattered, / like a monkey in the forest. / Am I sitting still? she asked him. / Is my face enough in pro?le? / Should I hold the bouquet higher? / Will it come into the picture? Next comes the turn of the daughter and the son, as infatuated as their parents...
The recollection of such sessions will be found in the Search: That year, when, a little earlier than usual, my parents had decided on the day to return to Paris, the morning of the departure, as my hair had been curled to be photographed, carefully set off by a hat I had never worn before and sporting a velvet overcoat... (Swanns Way).
Proust has evoked one of his childhood portraits in a passage of Sodom and Gomorrah devoted to the two sisters in the service of the household: Marie Gineste and Celeste Albaret. The latter asks her sister: Didnt you see in his dresser drawer the photograph of when he was a little boy? . . . The one with his little cane, all dressed up in fur and laceno prince ever had the like.
Toward the end of his life Proust showed Celeste Albaret the photograph in question: What do you think of this child, Celeste?
Why, Monsieur, thats a little prince. Lord, how handsome he is, with his little cane! It could be you, if he werent blond....
But Celeste, I was very blond as a child, before my hair grew in all black.
Presented in a gilded frame, this photograph, which Proust gave to Celeste, is now in the museum at Illiers, though its authenticity has been contested.
Whether he is wearing a gray dress with a row of buttons down the front, as we see him in his portrait at age six, or an Eton collar, a lavalliere, and short trousers buttoned above the knee, as in a photograph taken with his brother when he was ten, Prousts clothes are always those of a young and docile member of the haute bourgeoisie. Yet the childhood ?gure Proust draws of himself in Jean Santeuil altogether fails to match these album-cards. Despite his mothers vigilance, he declares, he was always ill dressed as a schoolboy, his ragged clothes covered with stains. And even laterdespite his impulses toward dandyismProust, whether out of absentmindedness, unconcern, or haste, actually paid little attention to his appearance; the gap between the out?ts for portrait sittings and those of everyday life is much greater than for the majority of his contemporaries.
When he informs his mother, away from Paris at the time: I havent had my hair cut, . . . I pull on my clothes as soon as I get out of bed. . . . So, not a moment . . . for washing up, Madame Proust, horri?ed, writes back: Be sure to pay attention to your appearance. If you have to dress yourself, be sure youre wearing the proper clothes. Above all, no more hair like the Frankish kings!
The young man thus admonished was thirty-three years old at the time. He wore green cravats carelessly tied, corkscrew trousers. . . . His top hats became hedgehogs and Skye terriers by dint of being brushed the wrong way. This description of Proust is furnished (in La Revue hebdomadaire, July 21, 1928) by his friend the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, who has left us the most ?attering and deceptive portrait of the writer.
His publisher, Gaston Gallimard, goes even further: I can see him as he ?rst stood before me in his black ill-?tting clothes buttoned all wrong, his long velvet-lined cape, his high starched collar, his tatty straw hat that was too small for him. Yet Gaston Gallimard seeks to modify this impression: Such garments might seem ridiculous by daylight: yet they somehow suggested a touching grace: a certain elegance was proposed, and also a great indifference to all elegance.
In July 1908, in a letter addressed to Henry Bernstein, Proust reproaches himself for his irreparable indecency, which he proposes to remedy in order to improve his appearance when in the dramatists company: I have ordered a whole wardrobe of new garments, notably a plaid overcoat with a violet lining. When I think of that evening you found me so poorly dressed you couldnt take me to the brothel!
In the Proust family correspondence, the subject of photography frequently arises. In August 1890, when Proust is doing his military service in Orleans, his mother has her portrait taken and sends him a copy. This is the occasion of a copious exchange of letters. Has Marcel found fault with her tense expression? Distressed by his criticism, she attempts to justify her disturbed expression: My darling, youre looking at my photographs all wrong, and youre quite mistaken about my appearance. Im . . . annoyed that my lip looks that way, its the photographers fault. . . . A snapshot would have beenmuch better than posing for so long. My eyes are tired, and anything but clear. Thats whats bothering you. But Monsieur Proust is quite happy with the portrait of his wife, who announces the fact triumphantly ten days later, and the family backs her up, as another letter attests: Your uncle and your grandfather consider my photograph one of the masterpieces of the age, and your father says it is better than any of the old ones. Meanwhile Madame Proust had sent another photo, taken this time by her younger son: Yesterday... I let Robert have a shot at me (enclosed). . . . Dont you think Roberthas posed me like Goethe peering upstairs? I love all that is above me. Hes made me stare into spaceand I look quite inspired.
If Marcel, in spite of his delicate health, had enlisted for military service, this was partly on account of his fondness for photography. He envied Gaston Caillavet, formerly a fellow student at the Lycee Condorcet, his seductive artillerymans uniform: if only he could have portraits of himself in such a resplendent out?t! If he could give one to Jeanne Pouquet, Gastons ?ancee, with whom he was so much in love! The moment he put on his military out?t, Proust had himself photographed in four different poses in front of a trellis. The ?rst person to whom he presented his portrait was his commanding of?cer, Lieutenant de Cholet, who gave him his own in exchange: To Marcel Proust, volunteer recruit, from one of his executioners.
Most portraits of Proust were taken by the fashionable establishments of the period: Pierre Petit, Photo Salomon, Photo Hermann, Photo H. Martini, Studio Nadar; but it was Otto, 15 Rue Royale, who would be his preferred portraitist and of whom he was to be, along with Robert de Montesquiou, a preferred customer. Messengers usually made a detour chez Otto to add Prousts latest portrait to his missives.
In July 1896, when Charles Maurras informs Proust that La Revue encyclopedique will be publishing an article on Pleasures and Regrets and requests a portrait, Proust eagerly complies: When do you need my photograph? If immediately, Ill send you one that is not good. If I have ten days or so, Ill go to Otto and have one made that I wont call worthy of me but of you. Maurras grants him the interval, and Proust hurries to Otto. The extremely favorable article having been published, Proust thanks Maurras by a long telegram, to which this postscript is attached: If La Revue encyclopedique could return my photographs, I would be very grateful. So he had submitted to Maurras not one but several portraits!
Moreover, each new portrait request from the press is the occasion for Proust to pose once again for his photographer.
Proust greatly admired Rejane, the principal model for Berma (the actress to whom the writer devoted one of the strongest, most terrible scenes of Time Regained, as we shall see shortly). He had accumulated a whole collection of photographs representing her in the plays that had made her famous, such as Anatol Frances The Red Lily and Edmond de Goncourts Germinie Lacerteux. In 1919, obliged to move out of his Boulevard Haussmann apartment and not knowing where to go, Proust accepted an invitation from the actress to come and live in her building, 8 bis Rue Laurent-Pichat, in a furnished apartment on the fourth ?oor. He remained only a few months under her roof: the move itself had already nearly killed him, he complained, and his hay fever, revived by the proximity of the Bois de Boulogne, had ?nished him off. He was further tormented by noises, which reached him quite unmuf?ed by the thin walls.
But such cohabitation was not entirely disadvantageous: it intensi?ed the intimacy of Prousts relations with Rejane; when he received the Prix Goncourt that year and the actress, through the intermediary of her son Jacques Porel, asked him what present he would like to have from her, Proust replied: Id like a photograph of Rejane as the Prince de Sagan. The actress immediately sent him her picture with the following dedication: Homage from a prince. Admiration from a friend. And bearing in mind her role as Germinie Lacerteux, one of her greatest triumphs, she signed the picture: Rejane, interpreter of the Goncourts.
On the occasion of the prize he had just received, Proust granted an interview to a staff writer for the magazine Comoedia. But instead of talking about his novel, he showed his interviewer the photo of Rejane as the Prince de Sagan and discussed her successful impersonation at great length. He praised the actress for having avoided any hint of masquerade: This is the only mans part taken by a woman I have ever seen that was not ridiculous. And when the journalist asked him to lend the photograph to illustrate his interview, Proust, after some hesitation, entrusted it to him, but with a plea: Dont spoil the photograph. I value it greatly. I worship Rejane, who is a great woman (Sur Rejane, in Essais et articles). The article appeared with the photograph on January 20, 1920; Rejane was to die six months later.
Even if we lacked the testimony of Prousts intimates with regard to his passion for photography, his work itself would easily bear witness: it abounds in scenes which are to all appearances only mildly transposed from reality. For instance, in Sodom and Gomorrah, Baron de Charlus, always in search of a new adventure, takes a tram, then a train, in order to follow a youth whom he hopes to pick up. Disappointment: at Orleans, where the young man gets off, his family is waiting for him on the platform! Yet what does Charlus complain of most? A missed opportunity? No: the unfortunate photograph he had been contemplating during the journey: There was only one seat free, I had to sit facing a view of the Cathedral of Orleans, the ugliest in all of France.
Behind the traveler dissatis?ed with these views of historical monuments (which still adorn the compartments of French trains) appears of course the ?gure of Marcel Proust himself. At the time of his military service, after having spent each Sunday of his leave in Paris, he caught the evening train at 7 : 40 for Orleans. Who but Proust would select his seat according to the photographed view he would have in front of him? Who would even recall the image before his eyes during the trip?
In September 1896, Proust writes his friend the composer Reynaldo Hahn: The day before yesterday I went to the Louvre. Do you like Quentin Matsyss painting of the man counting out gold pieces, where there is a tiny convex mirror that shows what is happening out in the street? Proust is referring to the painting The Moneylender and His Wife. If he is particularly struck by it, is it not because the so-called witch mirror, a magical object found in many works by artists of the Flemish school, is a pre?guration of the photographic image, which creates a faithful but miniaturized double of the external world?
This collector of photographs is quite prepared to discover snapshots from a period when photography does not properly exist. Invited to dinner in February 1895 with young Lucien and Leon Daudet, Proust is eager to bring them a little present, as he con?des to their father, Alphonse Daudet: Ill try to ?nd them an old photograph of Goethe skating at Frankfurt and also two pages of Lamar-tines Con?dences to illustrate Monsieur Luciens memories of skating. Now, Goethe died in 1832, and though photography had been invented by Niepce in 1824, its true birth dates only from 1839! So there is no chance that the author of Faust was recorded on skates.
Toward the end of the same year, Proust invited Lucien Daudet to tea; as the latter describes it in Autour de soixante lettres de Marcel Proust, the episode is quite characteristic: My new friend received me in his bedroom. . . . Aware of my timidity, after a ?rst attempt at an ex-tremely vague conversation, he said: Here, Ive collected a few photographs of famous people, actresses, writers, artiststhey may entertain you, and also this book. I glanced at the portraits . . . and I leafed through the book, which contained a quantity of photographs of Madame Laure Hayman and was bound in a piece of silk from one of her old dresses. I had the temerity to tell Marcel Proust that I wasnt much interested in all thiswhich rather disappointed him.
All of Prousts friends have reported the same experience of their visits: the sempiternal appearance of photographs. Here is the testimony of Andre Maurois, who had married the daughter of Gaston de Caillavet and Jeanne Pouquet: All his life Proust attached an extraordinary importance to the possession of a photograph. He kept a whole collection of them in his bedroom and would eagerly show them to his friends. In 1902 Proust writes to Prince Antoine Bibesco: Ive looked high and low and found one tiny portrait of this strange family.... Ill show you other photographs that will amuse you. In 1910 it is the young Jean Cocteau who is subjected to the ordeal-by-album in the apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, which Proust rarely left. According to Cocteau, there were two tables in the room, one, within arms reach of Prousts bed, covered with bottles, notebooks, the other piled with photos of tarts and duchesses, dukes and footmen employed in great houses. In December 1917, it was the young embassy attache Paul Morand whom Proust invited to inspect his collection. Further evidence for Prousts passion for albums of photographs comes from a letter of March 1908 addressed to his friend the Duke of Albufera, one of the models for Saint-Loup: Do you happen to have any albums of family photographs? You know, Im always interested in such things. If you could lend me one for a few hours . . . Id be eternally grateful.
And here is the account of Celeste Albaret, who took care of the writer in the last years of his life: In his bedroom dresser drawer, along with photos of his mother and some other people, there were also portraits of women he had known and sometimes admired, and some jewelry. He would often have me bring them to him. Other photographs were arranged on a pretty little Chinese chest in which he kept his money and bank papers. Jean Santeuil, Prousts double, also possessed his own photograph album in which Monsieur Santeuil was that black-bearded gentleman and Madame Santeuil that smiling blonde young woman in the fantastic velvet gown. Until his death, Proust retained a fervent interest in photography. In the spring of 1922, during his military service in the Armee du Rhin, Benoist-Mechin, the future historian, had made the acquaintance of the critic Ernst-Robert Curtius, who had sought Prousts authorization to translate his book into German. Benoist-Mechin offered to write the novelist. Though he was almost sure there would be no answer, he received a letter in which, to his great surprise, Proust requested his photograph, promising to return it immediately. Yet instead of returning it, he then asked if he could keep it, for the picture reminded him of Benoist-Mechins mother (of whom we shall speak shortly). And this was six months before Prousts death.
Proust was greatly attached to his manuscripts, to letters he had received, to his photograph collections. Yet his obligatory move from the Boulevard Haussmann in 1919 and the uncertainty of his eventual lodging compelled him to do without many of his possessions. He asked Celeste to proceed with an auto-da-fe of his papers, which ?lled many bags: letters, manuscripts, notebooks, photographs. Oddly enough, though Celeste con?rms the destruction of the thirty-two black leatherette notebooks, she denies having burned anything else: Someone, I dont know who, has written that before leaving the Boulevard Haussmann apartment, Monsieur Proust had made me destroy a great many papers, photographs, and other things. This is untrue. Yet in a letter of April 1919 to Doctor Abel Desjardinsa former fellow student at the Lycee CondorcetProust belies Celeste in advance: Lately, compelled to leave my Boulevard Haussmann residence, I have burned precious autographs, manuscripts of which no copies exist, and ever so many rare photographs.
What reason would Celeste have for contradicting Proust himself? Had she forgotten the episode, or might she have decided to cover up such an auto-da-fe in accord with her masters wishes? One can imagine with what feelings Proust watched that bon?re destroying so many precious souvenirs.
Continues...
Excerpted from Proust in the Power of Photographyby Brassai Copyright © 2001 by Brassai. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : University of Chicago Press; 1st edition (December 1, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 176 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0226071448
- ISBN-13 : 978-0226071442
- Item Weight : 12.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.78 x 6.31 x 0.66 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,264,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #270 in Photography Criticism & Essays (Books)
- #1,480 in Individual Photographers
- #2,818 in Photograpy Equipment & Techniques
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2018The deep knowledge Brassaï had of his subject.
I am using the book to complement my reading and study of Proust's work.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2017everything was ok
- Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2005I returned the book since I'd been under the impression it was a book of photography; it's not: it's a book *about* photography.