KATE ZAMBRENO

NOTEBOOK FRAGMENT FROM AUGUST 2018 JOURNAL FROM OPEN PAGE OF THE NOTEBOOK IN THE PHOTOGRAPH

Chantal Akerman and her mother
Moyra Davey replicating Akerman, thinking of her empty nest.

Kafka’s travel journal is a photograph.
That photo of him on the beach.

Her delicate swipe of eyebrow. Her thick eyelashes. Her feathery cheek.

A writer acquaintance, also 40, with a toddler, writes to me, “If I died now, she wouldn’t remember me.” This haunts me.

But she will never remember this mother (me) regardless.

The need to not illustrate a book on photography with photography. What a photograph does that language does not.

Austerlitz – photo as a child

A photograph will not remember how cold and slightly wet her butt is – only a journal?

A photograph is not a moment.
A photograph is a room of light.

The “photography” book – Barthes
The Missing Photograph – Duras

I’ve written 10 journal pages about photography as she hangs on my side, in the morning light. I read the entries to John. A book thinking through discovering photography. A book of fragments. The writing is like the morning light, he says.

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Kate Zambreno is the author of seven books, most recently the novel DRIFTS (Riverhead Books, May 2020). Forthcoming is TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD, a study on Hervé Guibert, from Columbia University Press, and she is at work on an essay collection, THE MISSING PERSON.