Noble Cast

CS: is that what the last photographs are about?

PA: No. I believe she did them for psychological reasons. She was going through a very rough time in '93, '94, '95. She obviously used photography as a kind of - I would say, oxygen. In '61 when she lived in Passy, her house was very close to the clinic of Dr. Blanche, the famous alienist, and he looked after her. When he died in August '93, that must have created a tremendous shock for her. Two weeks later she was back in the studio.

CS: So making photographs was a kind of therapy.

PA: Probably. And she created some very beautiful, strange photographs. But she received another shock in '94 when she was asked to leave her apartment on the Place Vendome. She moved into a three-room place above a restaurant, without air, without light. Again she went back to the photographer. And all along there was the negative press. Already in '69 it was rumored that she was mad. There was a description in an issue of Le Gaulois, a paper usually well informed, of a woman, the toast of Paris ten years earlier, having lost her beauty, wandering the streets, like a beggar: It seemed to describe the kind of woman she would become later, at the end of her life - and she stilt had thirty years to go. In the '80s, everything connected with the frivolous period of the Second Empire, which brought on the disaster of the war in '70, came under attack. In the '90s the people from the period of the Second Empire started to publish their memoirs. She appeared in many of them in an unfavorable light. So she needed reassurance.

CS: What do you think she was trying to do in the last photos?

PA: The photographs at the end are incredibly poignant, because one does not know if they are meant to be self-conscious caricature or if she was deluding herself in believing she was still beautiful. There is one picture in which she is showing her arm in the mirror, and the way she looks at her arm, she seems to wonder, Is this what I have become? Or, on the contrary, look how beautiful it is. One cannot tell if she has totally lost it or if she has retained a critical sense. In a late photograph, her feet - she is lying on a sofa and she has put her feet against a cushion - are shown from the point of view of someone who's on her deathbed, like a sculpture on a tomb. It's unsettling. Here she is definitely seeing what she has become. There is another later image of her smiling with her hands joined. But it's a demented gaze and a frozen smile, and her hands seem to be making a gesture that symbolizes the pubis. So one does not know what is really going on.

CS: What's interesting to us about the countess and her photographs at this point in time?

PA: In contemporary art and literature, we have learned to piece together a figure out of fragments - to see the figure behind the fragmented mosaic. These photographs, too, involve a kind of building up to get meaning out of separate, discrete pieces, which is very, contemporary. One photograph does give you a simple clue, but ten of them lead to a much richer, nuanced, multileveled reading. Take Nan Goldin - one photograph says something about its subject, but when you have twelve you start to see the world of the photographer herself. I think the work of the countess acquires depth of meaning when considered in its totality. To use a medium usually viewed as an authoritative record of reality in the service of the imagination - that is a very contemporary notion. And, of course, there is the idea of using the self-portrait as a vehicle for an imaginary self. You can go in many directions with that: Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura. In the case of the countess, though, the only thing she ever impersonates is her idea of herself. Impersonating is the right word here. One feels, looking at hundreds of images of her, that behind the facade of impassive beauty there is turmoil, panic, despair - a very' modern condition!