Sonia Wilson

Show and Tell: Negotiating Self and Seeing in Les Photos d'Alix by Jean Eustache

Narrative identity transactions predicated on acts of seeing and telling take place everyday: we hand someone a photograph and observe casually as we pass it over ‘Thats me!’ However, occasionally we find ourselves unable to participate in such exchanges: ‘Thats me?’ we ask incredulously, as a photograph is shown us on which we apparently appear. Distanced from both the image and the person who smilingly hands it over, we suddenly understand that our sense of self is bound up with acts of seeing, and that the negotiation of the relationship between the two is necessarily social in nature. This essay will investigate the complexity of such acts of show and tell by focussing on a short film by Jean Eustache in which the photographer Alix Roubaud shows 19 of her photographs to Boris, the young son of the filmmaker. Alix specialised in self-portraiture. In the course of the film, Boris is called upon to perform acts of identification four times. However, it is not merely Alixs identity that is up for grabs here. The age difference between Roubaud and Boris, Alixs flirtatious glances and assured gestures, cast this as a scene of seduction: the boy is being turned into a man through an apparent initiation into the arts of seeing and looking. As she points and poses, Alix recounts stories about each of the photographs: technical details here, anecdotes concerning the mise en scène there. The making of the man is mediated by stories of the making of the photographs and vice versa: sexual identity and photographic meaning are being simultaneously negotiated. However, as the film progresses, what we see and what we hear bear an increasingly erratic relationship to each other. Distanced from the narrative relationship formed by Alix and the hapless Boris, we come to focus on the film itself as another expository instance.

“Que mes photos soient dans le quotidien”: The Diary Writing and Photographic Self-Portraiture of Alix Cléo Roubaud

This essay investigates the affinities and potential parallels between pre-digital photographic self-portraiture and diary writing. It does so by focusing on the work of Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952–1983), professional photographer and private diarist. Roubauds photographic practice of self-portraiture takes its cue from the diary: she seeks to anchor her photographs in the everyday.

The work of collecting: Objects, sociality and self in Leïla Sebbar’s Lettres parisiennes and Mes Algéries en France:

This article investigates the ways in which Leïla Sebbar draws on collecting practices as a means of performing what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemorial work. It begins with a close analysis of Sebbar’s accounts of the small, apparently trivial objects with which she surrounds herself, and how these accounts function as part of the narrative identity work in which she engages in the course of Lettres parisiennes. The insight afforded Sebbar into her own collecting practices in the course of this correspondence, and in particular her understanding of personal collecting as a social act, can be seen as subtending the composition of Mes Algéries en France, published 18 years later. Sebbar has now shifted from asking herself why particular objects have accumulated about her to displaying the work that collection performs. By juxtaposing and interspersing photographs of her own collections with those of others and with objects clearly designated as constituent parts of other collections, Sebbar crafts an archival site that negotiates between personal, familial and institutional contexts of display to designate the history of France–Algeria as constructed by the particular kinds of encounters that occur between people and objects in each.