[Photographie] Extraordinaire réunion de photographies de Maurice Blanchot prises dans la sphère familiale

(Maurice BLANCHOT)
Extraordinary collection of Maurice Blanchot's original photographs taken in the family setting, the only printings
C. 1907-2003 | 272 photographs | various format
“Blanchot challenged photographers and caricaturists of the literary press for a long-time. His 'portraits', over so many years, are minimalist and rare: in 1962 in L'Express, a hand holds up a book, at the bottom of the page; in 1979, in Libération, a blank square is in the middle of the page, with only Maurice Blanchot's name and a quote from the Entretien infini as a caption: ‘an empty universe: nothing that was visible, nothing that was invisible'” (C. Bident, Maurice Blanchot).
In 1986, at the time of an exhibition of writers' portraits, he requested that his photo be replaced by a text showing his desire to “appear as little as possible, not to glorify [his] books, but to avoid the presence of an author who was entitled to an independent existence.”
A photo taken without him knowing by a paparazzi in a supermarket carpark was used as the writer's portrait for a long time before his friend Emmanuel Levinas revealed a few rare photographs of their youth.
The fact that Maurice Blanchot did not oppose this release and the fact that this was his closest friend's deed, could be explained by what Bident calls “the spacing of worry,” as the revealed portraits were not up-to-date, similar to the postponed publications of his books L'Idylle, Le Dernier Mot, L'Arrêt de mort....
Only a few photographs gathered on the central pages of the Cahiers de l'Herne issue dedicated to Maurice Blanchot and published in 2014 supplement these unique shots of the 20th-century's most secret writer.
In his chapter “The indisposition of the secret” Christophe Bident devotes several pages to the almost total absence of images of this invisible partner, questioning the intellectual and psychological motivation of the writer who was aware of the inevitable future revelation of his appearance:
“Everything must become public. The secret must be told. The darkness must emerge. That which cannot be said must, however, be heard. Quidquid latet apparebit, all that is hidden, is that which must appear...” Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littéraire)
In general, Maurice Blanchot refused to be photographed even in private life as confirmed by the family of his sister-in-law Anna, who, revealed in a letter to her nephew that she had not taken any photographs of the writer, thus respecting his wishes.
However, the photographs taken with his close family show us a perfectly willing Blanchot, and one even playing very elegantly with the image of himself that he projects to the photographer, generally his brother. As such, we discover an elegant man posing proudly on a boat pontoon or on the banks of the Seine, or more mysteriously, playing with lighting effects in the corner of an empty room. Here we see a real photographic staging, and a symbolic reappropriation of image, particularly in a surprising seated portrait of the writer holding the “Inconnue de la Seine” death mask in his arms, the well-known plaster head of a young woman supposedly drowned who adorned artists' studios after 1900. A true romantic legend, this sculpture with a mysterious post-mortem smile is at the heart of Aragon's novel, Aurélien, and haunts the work of artists at the beginning of the century, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Vladimir Nabokov, Claire Goll, Jules Supervielle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Giacometti and Man Ray who produced a worrying photographic portrait of the mask at Aragon's request.
Maurice Blanchot described the unknown woman as “an adolescent girl with her eyes closed, but full of life with a smile so slender, so rich, [...] that we could believe that she was drowned in a moment of extreme happiness.”
This photograph of an impervious Blanchot cradling the white mask of the “Mona Lisa of suicide” asserts itself as a true deconstruction of representation. It becomes an illustration, as perfect as it is enigmatic, of his literary work and of the “silence of its own.”
Numerous photographs bear witness to the same concern for the misuse of representation in favor of an aporetic symbolism, such as this full-length portrait of the writer dressed in black, blending into the receding perspective of buildings, but whose forehead only is encircled with a halo of harsh light that seems to spring from his skull and erase the roofs' contours. Or this other photograph where the light encircles half of an empty room with a halo and divides the pictures into two equal parts: a dark space where Maurice Blanchot holds his hands behind his back at the very edge, and a lit space, entirely empty with the exception of one of the writer's feet which dares to cross over.
These photographs taken with his brother show a perfect mastery of image and of his artistic codes.
Other photographs, with more classic compositions, bring a precious and unique testimony on Maurice Blanchot's life and on his family relationships, being the writer's hidden side and his one true anchor to physical life. Maurice Blanchot, with whom his closest friends only usually had telephone contact, lived most of his life with his family. First of all in the family home in Quain, then hosted by his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna, where he stayed even after René and subsequently Anna's death. Maurice also had the most significant correspondence with his mother and his sister Marguerite (more than 1400 letters) throughout their lives, sharing with them all aspects of his intellectual, social and political life. Finally, his niece Annick, daughter-in-law of his brother Georges, and his young nephew Philippe were almost the only people authorised to enter René, Anna and Maurice's apartment, where the writer lived as a hermit. It is incidentally this niece and her son – a photographer – who collected and preserved the precious photographic documents portraying the writer.
Here we discover the slender figure of a man whose fragile constitution contributed to his dependence on his family, with whom he led a simple and happy life, posing naturally next to his mother, walking his nephew by the hand, sharing a family meal in the garden or talking in the living room. Blanchot's postures are those of a quiet man, not running from the lens and posing sometimes on the contrary with a certain, very assumed, dandyism. On several other photographs, Blanchot poses in the foreground in the same solemnly elegant pose, perfectly out of kilter with the landscape and the other people in the background. This repetition of the same pose in different settings gives Maurice Blanchot a ghostly, or at least unreal, presence.
However, these photographs also give as much as they can some information about Maurice Blanchot's private life, his travels, his relationships, his everyday world with his family and the different periods of his life. The photographs collected here start with family portraits on bistre albumin prints, even showing Maurice Blanchot as a few months old infant, and finish with color analogue photographs on Kodak paper, in which the writer is seated very seriously on his velvet sofa weighing up the camera in a low-angle shot, or, mischievous in a green garden, is shown hiding his face behind a cat lovingly held in his arms. Finally, as if to close this unique album of the only writer who managed to make himself invisible to the world during his life, a head and shoulders photograph wearing a deep black sweater shows us the writer's radiant face that seems to laugh at the great trick he played on his contemporaries.
With the exception of some identity shots and travel memories he took at the end of his life, this unique and complete content is the only photographic source of Maurice Blanchot, of his living environment and his family, this private circle voluntarily hidden from the gaze and interest of the public and his friends, yet at the root of the writer's contentious relationship with the outside world.
The photographs in this collection are much more than a mundane documentation from the side-lines of Maurice Blanchot's work; they bear witness to the real mastery of the image, its perspective and its power of reflexivity.
Like a final gift from the author of Thomas l'Obscur, these unique signs of his passage make the person who formerly disappeared behind his work suddenly reappear, bringing the miracle of his “Toma” (twin) to life: to be and not to be.