Roger Grenier, A Box of Photographs, trans. by Alice Kaplan (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013).

We live in a world filled with photos and cameras. Yet the philosophies and histories of photography seem unhelpful to understand what they mean to us, the intimate connections they produce, their haunting nature. In A Box of Photographs, French writer and editor at Éditions Gallimard Roger Grenier tackles these entanglements by revisiting his own life story: a personal history of photography. Through Alice Kaplan’s very readable translation, A Box of Photographs unfolds in brief, revealing vignettes, that merge memoir, philosophy, intellectual and cultural histories into a fragmented narrative. The book evokes Grenier’s early days in Pau, his father’s shop, his remembrances of the war, and his later life in Paris. Cameras and photographs appear in almost every page, showing the crucial role they played in every part of his life. But the book does not read as a biography. It feels—as the title suggests—like opening that old shoe box, buried at the back of a closet, filled with objects, train tickets, letters, and postcards: memorabilia. 

Through these fragmented personal stories, Grenier weaves a collection of notes and essays on the practice and idea of photography with the ones of his heroes—photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Brassaï, Morath, and writers such as Carroll, Camus, Schopenhauer, and Sontag. Describing what it means to take (and pose for) a portrait, Grenier writes:

They say you have to capture someone’s expression to take a successful photograph. To take, to capture—these aren’t innocent words. Even before the attempt at seduction, getting a girl to let you take her photo and keep a photo is like getting a charm or a fetish—something precious. Brassaï showed to what extent Proust was under the spell of photography. If they refused, Proust insisted—he’d go as far as to steal.

The combination of personal experiences, anecdotes, with the work of other writers and photographers, draws us into the infinite life of photographs. It unearths their secret meanings and uses through Grenier’s words and images. Each fragment discloses a new idea of what photographs can be. Anyone interested in exploring the complex nature of photography will profit immensely from reading this beautiful, personal book—or better: from opening someone else’s box.