Truth in Photographs: Marcel Proust

This chapter discusses the attraction of portrait photographs in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and suggests that Proust ultimately looks for truth in such pictures. It first examines the narrator’s passion for portrait photographs and his efforts to obtain pictures of the women he desires and admires. This inclination demonstrates the importance of photographs in Marcel’s sentimental education and is indicative of a tendency to entertain an intimate, affective, tactile relation to portrait photographs. Next, the chapter studies how the narrator engages in face studies, seeing facial lines and gestures as revealing the truth about a person. In this context, the reading of portrait photographs is associated with a process of subjective “development.” The third section looks at an opposite tendency in the novel: encounters with portrait photographs that give access to otherness and exteriority. The concluding section discusses Proust’s search for truth in photographs in light of the emergence of the illustrated press and considers how the spread of portrait photographs in the mass media reconfigured the relation between the private and public spheres.