Todas as imagens vão desaparecer: a relação entre literatura e fotografia em L’usage de la photo e Os anos de Annie Ernaux

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the incorporation of photography into the work of French writer Annie Ernaux, with a particular focus on L’usage de la photo (2005), co-authored with photographer Marc Marie, and Os anos (2021). The aim is to analyze how the image functions as a narrative catalyst, contributing to mechanisms of memory, subjectivation, and the representation of time (Jordan, 2011). In L’usage de la photo, photography is explored as a trace—however fragile—of the couple’s intimate and fleeting moments, prompting reflections on the body, desire, and the transience of lived time. In The Years, although no photographs are reproduced, visual description serves as an anchoring device for the autobiographical narrative, which intertwines personal and historical memories across several decades of the author's life. Drawing on photographic theory as elaborated by Roland Barthes (2018), Boris Kossoy (2014), and Jacques Rancière (2021), this dissertation argues that photography, far from being a mere illustrative resource, establishes in Ernaux’s work a continuous dialogue between gaze and word, text and image—between what the photograph reveals and what it conceals. Photography thus emerges not merely as a record of past events, but as a provocation that challenges the limits of the image itself (Didi-Huberman, 2018), of narrative (Brizuela, 2014), and, more broadly, of how artistic fields intersect in contemporary culture (Escobar, 2004; Krauss, 2022).