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1. Autobiographical Index and Biographical Images
In 1992 Anny Duperey, better known as an actress than as a writer, published Le Voile noir. The work mixes photographs and narrative and is fairly original in its concept. It links photographs, photographer, reader and beholder (reader and narrator) in an emotional dynamic, ensuring its commercial success when it appeared for the holiday season. The discourse created around the photographs and originally meant as the discourse of those photographs reenacts the search of a discourse proper to photography. Let us examine the premises and the fate of this discourse.
Anny Duperey's parents, Lucien and Ginette Legras, died of accidental asphyxiation in the bathroom of their new home on November 6, 1955. Anny was eight and a half years old, her sister was five months old. In Le Voile noir, Anny tells how she refused to deal with the loss directly and erased any memories of her life with her parents before the tragedy, hence "le voile noir" [the black veil]. Anny's father was a professional photographer for about five years before he died. He was a member of a group dubbed "Le groupe des sept." His carefully protected negatives remained with Anny's sister and then with Anny herself for more than thirty years before the latter had the strength to have them printed. These pictures and the trauma of Anny's childhood are presented to the readers as the origin of the book and the material for it:
"Mon pere fit ces photos. Je les trouve belles. Il avait, je crois, beaucoup de talent. J'avais depuis des annees envie de les montrer. Parallellement montait en moi la sourde envie d'ecrire, sans avoir recours au masque de la fiction, sur mon enfance coupee en deux. Ces deux envies se sont tout naturellement rejointes et justifiees l'une l'autre. Car ces photos sont beaucoup plus pour moi que de belles images, elles me tiennent lieu de memoire. Je n'ai aucun souvenir de mon pere et de ma mere. Le choc de leur disparition a jete sur les annees qui ont precede un voile opaque, comme si elles n'avaient jamais existe. (Le Voile noir 9)
Duperey's book is certainly original in its conception and escapes a conventional literary genre classification. The mixed media...