“Hervé, the artist, resolutely and actively opens a personal landscape to the inspiration and expectation of all others,” writes Yvonne Baby, who had hired him as a photography critic for the culture section of the French newspaper Le Monde. According to academics Jean-Pierre Boulé and Arnaud Genon, authors of a book about the writer, “beauty and horror, the living and the dead, all combine in Guibert’s photographs to create a tainted aesthetic.” Whether he personally posed lying on the floor, took pictures of his old aunt’s white hair, or captured the pale face of French actress Isabelle Adjani, his black-and-white images enthrall and disturb the viewer. All that remained was the written word, far more important than photography, which he viewed as a minor pursuit. “This text is the despair of the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged image – a ghost image,” he writes. But when his father developed the film, the image had failed to print onto the reel. He did her hair and makeup, made her change out of her old clothes that made her look shapeless and stiff, and sat her in an armchair. In Ghost Image, Guibert reveals how, at the age of 18, he convinced his mother to pose for him so he could try out his father’s little Rollei 35 camera.
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