Jean-Christophe Bailly's New Book Juxtaposes Talbot and Hiroshima Photographs

Jean-Christophe Bailly's latest book, 'L'instant et son ombre' (Éditions du Seuil, Fiction & Cie), blends essay, novel, and poetry around the montage of two photographs. The first, from 1844, is by W.H. Fox Talbot from 'The Pencil of Nature', showing a haystack in sunlight. The second is from U.S. Air Force archives of the devastated Hiroshima site in 1945. Both images share a detail: the shadow of a ladder—on the haystack and on a wall remnant, fixed by nuclear radiation. Bailly uses this to reflect on photographic specificity, echoing Barthes ('Camera Lucida'), Godard ('Histoire(s) du cinéma'), and Didi-Huberman ('Images in Spite of All'). The book argues that the power of an image lies in the juxtaposition of distant realities, from Talbot's bucolic scene to Hiroshima's terrifying imprint. A ladder, like Jacob's, does not always connect heaven and earth; it can cast a shadow that writes itself on an image as a pure testimony of time. Philippe Forest writes: 'Because it is also, in its own way, a shadow or the deposit of a shadow, every photograph is the memory of a radiation, of an occurrence of radiation, and the premonition of a ruin, or of an erasure.'