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Uncertain list of figures
The story follows Alice, a young French woman completing an internship in New York, who becomes entangled in an intense and increasingly toxic relationship with photography student Nathan. The novel's central narrative motif is the interplay of becoming visible and simultaneously withdrawing. Caught between the desire to be seen, to be part of an urban bohemian scene, and the fear of losing herself, Alice oscillates in a world of art, surface, emotion, and imagery. Her relationship with Nathan, as well as with his charismatic girlfriend Léonore, becomes a projection screen for Alice's insecurities and longings.
Audrey Jarre's debut novel The negatives Jarre develops a compelling narrative about this young woman in the big city, who risks losing herself in love, language, and images. The story is told from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Alice, who is caught between cultural projection, intellectual bohemia, and emotional dependence. Jarre interweaves themes of migration, the role of girls and women in a world dominated by male gazes, and aesthetic and existential questions surrounding photography, self-presentation, and artistic appropriation.
The photographic negative is ambiguous: On the one hand, it refers to the photographic medium that inverts light, preserving the invisible and distorting the visible. On the other hand, it is semantically associated with loss, darkness, and absence. The novel itself functions like a negative: It shows not only what is, but above all, what is missing. Relationships, belonging, and meaning become visible in Jarre's text through their fissures, gaps, and reflections. The first-person narrator, Alice, is herself a negative image: She does not develop a fixed self, but rather writes herself as a projection surface. In encounters with Nathan, the photographer, with his girlfriend Léonore, and with the city of New York itself, she reflects on her possibilities and inadequacies. She is less a subject than a character, less an actor than an object in a play of glances, poses, and reactions. This desubjectification is also staged through the motif of the camera, through light, through framing and reproduction. Alice becomes a museum piece and a model—the "negative" of the Other.
C'est ce tu avais fait l'année d'avant, étudier ton environnement, comme flottant au-dessus sans jamais en faire partie. You need to detach the tyrannous person to impose the vision of the world. It takes a long time to present itself in a different way that you can see the shape of the heart, in negative terms. You know that you don't want to come back.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
You had done that the year before, studying your surroundings as if hovering above them, without ever being a part of them. You possessed the detachment that tyrants need to impose their worldview. You had been exposed to your perfect opposite for so long that you knew its form inside and out, as a negative form. You knew what you didn't want to become.
Jarre portrays Alice as a modern version of the flâneuseAlice drifts through the streets of New York, through cafes, galleries, and apartments, without a fixed anchor. But she is more than an observer: she plays a role, rewriting herself. The identity she inhabits is not authentic, but constructed, fleeting, and constantly presented. This is particularly evident in her relationship to language: she repeatedly reflects on what it is like to live in English, with "subtitles in your head." She translates not only words, but herself. Her relationship with Nathan is characterized by the longing to be seen, to belong—and simultaneously by the fear of being merely a copy. Alice's status as an "expatriate" acts as a catalyst for self-experimentation, but also as a fallacy: the freedom to be someone else is bought at the price of the insecurity of no longer being anyone. The novel describes a subject defined less by origin and character than by surface appearance, attitude, and the resonance in the eyes of others.
After the verre, Léonore is ready to continue the soirée chez elle. All the world is available. C'était a mardi soir et personne n'avait envie de rentrer dormir, à part moi.
These taxis are now available to traverse Manhattan in a few minutes in a course-poursuite urban sur les avenues that, in all of them, are very exotic and exciting, and are also banal. My eyes are available for capture in detail, but I can still see the previous photos. Personne ne not regardait par la fenêtre, ils étaient tous sur leurs téléphones.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
After the drinks, Leonore suggested we continue the evening at her house. Everyone agreed. It was Tuesday evening, and apart from me, no one felt like going home and sleeping.
Two taxis had whisked us through Manhattan in less than ten minutes, in an urban chase along the avenues that, while still exotic and exciting to me, were commonplace for them. My eyes had taken in every detail, but I had refrained from taking photos. No one was looking out the window; everyone was busy with their cell phones.
The relationship between Alice and Nathan unfolds through seduction, appropriation, and ultimately, transgression. Alice becomes a "muse," but also a model, a medium, and a target for manipulation. Nathan photographs her, stages her, tells her how she should appear. He is a classic representative of the "male gaze" à la Laura Mulvey, who not only observes but also produces: he transforms Alice into an image, an object of his desire and his artistic will. The camera here is an instrument of control and power. At the same time, Alice wants to be seen. The power structure is ambiguous because she also places herself in this role—she wants to be "part of his film," wants to please and be recognized. This dynamic makes the novel particularly complex: Jarre doesn't simply condemn but reveals a web of needs, expectations, and projections. The abuse hinted at in the relationship is subtle, emotional, almost intangible, and precisely for that reason so destructive. Alice's self-abandonment is not a rupture but a gradual erosion.
New York appears in the novel not merely as a place, but as an aesthetic. The city is a projection screen and a myth, a backdrop. Alice feels "in a film," and she wants to be part of this film. Jarre describes New York not topographically, but atmospherically. Cafés, galleries, apartments, diners—they are all part of an urban script that enables certain lifestyles and excludes others. The city becomes a media matrix in which subjects stage and lose themselves. The city's poetics are closely linked to the camera: New York is photographable, iconic. Alice moves as if through an endless film set: How do they act, how do they appear, how do they read? The city is a web of signs, a textual and visual code that Alice tries to decipher without ever fully understanding it.
J'ai répondu à Ben que oui, il avait raison, j'écrivais.
Il n'a pas répondu tout de suite, comme s'il pesait ses mots pour trouver la combinaison la plus adequate entre détachement et intérêt pour mon art en gestation.
I'm imagining that I'm going to pass through my little blonde hair. L'écriture, contrairement à la photography, était à la portée de tous les possesseurs de paper et crayon. Elle is not covered in a training technique, which is also available before the tangible avant-garde croire that is available in good condition. On pouvait donc y faire n'importe quoi, and c'était probablement mon cas.
Nathan mangeait without presque nous regarder, comme si tous les deux s'étaient entendus à l'advance sur le script de ce film muet. This is a test, a validation of the presence in the world by a level of confidence. Si c'était vrai, j'appréciais moyennement cet examen d'entrée dès le petit-déjeuner. La gueule de bois me rendait molle, j'avais l'impression que mon corps, sous l'afflux de questions, se recroquevillait sur lui-même.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
I replied to Ben that yes, he was right, I would write.
He did not reply immediately, as if he were weighing his words to find the best combination of detachment and interest in my emerging art.
I imagined what must be going on in his little blond head. Writing, unlike photography, was accessible to anyone who owned paper and a pencil. It didn't hide behind technical training; there were no tangible prerequisites before you believed that what you had done was good. So you could do whatever you wanted, and that was probably the case for me, too.
Nathan ate, almost without looking at us, as if the two of them had already agreed on the script for this silent film. Perhaps it was a test, a sober confirmation of my presence in their world by a trusted third party. If that was the case, I already found this entrance exam rather unpleasant at breakfast. The hangover was making me weak; I felt as if my body would curl up under the onslaught of questions.
The novel eschews classical dramaturgy. There is no goal-oriented narrative, no cathartic development, but rather a progressive resolution. Time unfolds in episodes, in flashbacks. This temporal structure reflects Alice's inner state: disorientation leading to exhaustion and dissociation. Like a film composed of individual frames, the events lose their causality; they simply exist. The episodic structure makes The negatives The result is a modern urban novel in which experiences unfold not linearly, but simultaneously and fragmentarily. The ending is not a conclusion, but a final glance: like a film that ends with a blurred, open scene.
From the darkroom
Audrey Jarre's debut novel The negatives It is not only a novel about big-city life and an exploration of female subjectivity, but also a contribution to contemporary literature on seeing, being seen, and the role of images. Jarre divides her novel into three clearly defined parts. This structure is more than a structuring device; it forms the narrative and poetic axis of the novel and simultaneously draws on the technical vocabulary of analog photography. This tripartite division can be read as a symbolic and poetological developmental process, as a literary realization of photographic processes: capturing the image, condensing it into a negative, and developing it into a print.
Photographic metaphors permeate the entire novel. This is already evident in the motto – a quote from Roland Barthes' La Chambre claire By describing photography as a “micro-expérience of death,” Jarre suggests that her text is in close dialogue with image theory. Photography is not only thematically addressed but structurally implemented. Photography is not merely a medium of representation but an existential event. It fixes, objectifies, and transforms life into stillness, into image. For Alice, being photographed is simultaneously confirmation and annihilation: she is seen, but as something other than herself.
Jarre also integrates a discourse of documentation, the question of the truth of the image: What does a photograph show? What does it tell? What story does it construct? This becomes clear in the relationship between Alice and Nathan: The photographs he takes are supposedly "real," "authentic," but they are created under control, through staging. Jarre's novel reflects on photographic theories that address the violence of the camera, its historical and political power.
« When looking at the photo finale, it is difficult to recognize what is seen in the negative. The version that is on a cru saisir dans the object is plus loin encore, elle a valeur de chimère. En développant, on avoue presque toujours s'être trompé.
« C'est la photo finale qui a raison, on ne peut lui opponentr d'argumentation féroce: c'est elle qui décide.
« Les forms elles-mêmes, une fois transformées par l'apparition de leurs véritables couleurs, remplies par des bleus sombres ou des indigos terrestres, débarrassées de leurs cyans éthérés, ne se ressemblent plus. »
The professor has a break for a break in the gorge, and the guttural noise is available with a sound tympan comme un acouphène.
« Les erreurs d'interpretation viennent de multiples sources. Il suffit que le négatif ait été un peu abîmé pour que le résultat ne soit pas exactement celui qui était prévu. The faute can only be imputed to the imagination.
After you see the photo, without any contact with the reality, on a pu l'imaginer telle qu'on voudrait qu'elle soit. It's all a reality. Ainsi, the debut photographer is souvent déçu. The negative, this is the photographer who says “je” and “tu”, which objective without avoir la réalité entière sous les yeux. Développer, c'est devenir humble par rapport à l'ensemble de ses perceptions. »
Tu avais soupiré sans retenue. You're visible, you'll hear the sound agacement. These épaules are levaient and s'abaissaient en cadence, like a chorégraphie de danse contemporary.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
"When you look at the final photograph, it's sometimes difficult to recognize what you saw on the negative. The version you thought you were capturing through the lens is even further removed; it has the value of a chimera. During development, you almost always have to admit that you were wrong."
"It is the final photograph, the one that has the right to do so; you can't counter it with wild arguments: it is the decision."
"The forms themselves, once transformed by the appearance of their true colors, filled with dark blues or earthly indigo, and freed from their ethereal cyans, no longer resemble each other."
The teacher had paused to clear his throat, and the guttural sound had hit your eardrum like tinnitus.
"Misinterpretations come from many sources. Even slight damage to the negative is enough to prevent the result from being exactly as intended. However, the error can only be attributed to imagination."
Having taken a photograph without engaging with its reality, one can imagine it as one would like it to be. One has transcended its reality. This is why the novice photographer is often disappointed. The negative is the photographer who says "I" and "you," who objectifies without having the whole of reality before them. Developing means becoming humble in relation to the totality of one's perceptions.
You sighed uncontrollably. You wanted to be seen, to show your annoyance. Your shoulders rose and fell in time with the music, like in a contemporary dance choreography.
Narratively, the novel also adopts photographic techniques: snapshots, blurred edges, omissions, and repetitions. Jarre writes as if looking through a lens: selectively and with focus, aesthetically. The language follows this logic: it is precise, meticulously detailed, yet laconic and analytical at the same time. The negatives Literature is a darkroom: it stores, exposes, and develops. The poetics of the novel, in its three parts, follows the three-step process of analog photography:
1 Alice – the recording, posing, the fleeting moment
2 Negatives – the negative, the reversal, the darkness, the invisibility
3 Tirages – the deduction, the becoming visible, the distanced observation
This structure, however, is not linear, but cyclical – refractive, double-exposed. The narrative emerges like a photograph: from light and shadow, from perspective and omission, from chemistry and mechanics.
The first part, with the programmatic title "Alice," introduces us to the narrator's subjective world. It is characterized by a language of self-observation, irony, and even fascination. Alice describes her daily life in New York, her love for Nathan, and her encounter with Léonore—but above all, she describes herself in the act of narration. This self-description follows an aesthetic of "self-presentation." Alice lives in constant reflection on her appearance, her impact, and her position within the urban landscape. The city becomes a stage, her own self a performance. Jarre describes this with a mixture of irony and melancholy: Alice is aware of her role, she knows the codes, but she suffers from their limitations. In photographic terms, this part is the taking: the posing and the capturing of a moment. It is about composition, about light, and about visibility. Alice searches for the right light, both literally and figuratively. But even here, it becomes clear that visibility does not mean liberation, but rather a new limitation. The camera, which Alice desires because she wants to be seen, also becomes an instrument of objectification.
In the second part, "Négatifs" (Negatives), the poetics shift radically. The language becomes cooler, more fragmented, less self-ironic, but all the more analytical. Alice no longer narrates from the perspective of someone who is part of a game, but as someone who slowly realizes that she herself is the playing field. She is an object in Nathan's paintings, a reluctant muse, so to speak. The title "Négatifs" refers to the photographic medium, which does not yet make the image visible. The negative is not truth, but a reversal: light becomes shadow, brightness becomes dark. This reversal is evident in Alice's perception of her relationship with Nathan: what began as love now appears as appropriation; what was perceived as visibility, as invisibility. The negative phase is also a phase of condensation. The narrative becomes denser and psychologically more complex. Jarre uses photography here as a conceptual device: Alice becomes both the image and the trace. The camera takes, but gives nothing back. This phase is the “micro-expérience de la mort” (Barthes) mentioned at the beginning: the vulnerability to the gaze, the awareness of one's own imageability. It is the moment in which the subject becomes pure form.
The third part, "Tirages," introduces a new movement: The images are "developed." DrawIn classical photography, the print signifies the visible manifestation of the image on paper. It is the step from the invisible to the visible, from the latent image to the concrete form. Alice, too, begins to develop—not in the sense of redeeming or liberating herself, but in the sense that she begins to reflect with distance. The tone becomes clearer, more reduced. She withdraws from Nathan's gaze without confronting him. She realizes that her pictures don't show "herself," but rather a version that others need. And she begins to find her own language for her experiences. In Jarre's narrative, however, the process of "tirage" is not an end, but a first step toward a sense of her own time. The resulting images are not "truer" than the negative, but they are legible. They bear the traces of development: the exposure, the errors, and the scratches. Alice does not become a heroine, but she does become a narrator.
Photographic practice and intermedial structure
The members of the group before the photos, both in silver, have a minimal number of prices. Se focaliser sur l'essentiel. C'est toi qui developed tous les negatives. Tu leur interdissais de le faire. It is important to ensure that the necessary precautions are taken to ensure the quality of the image is confidential. Ils glissaient les enveloppes sous ta porte. You aim to discover the clichés, in the black room, which you can see little by little.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
The group members took photographs, always on film, a minimal number of shots. Focusing on the essentials. You were the one who developed all the negatives. You forbade them from doing it. Only you knew how to take the necessary precautions, both for the quality of the image and for confidentiality. They slipped the envelopes under your door. You loved discovering the pictures alone in the darkroom, gradually revealing themselves to you.
The poetic design of The negatives It is based on a consistent transgression of media boundaries. Jarre not only uses photographic vocabulary, but also structures her text according to principles of image production. Literary writing itself becomes the "camera," the means of selection, framing, and exposure. Literature not only imitates the aesthetics of photography, but integrates them as an epistemic model, in focusing, blurring, sequencing, and light composition.
- Scenes are composed like photographic excerpts. Alice's perception is selective; she observes details with almost microscopic precision. This creates an impression of intimacy, but also of isolation, as if everything were separated by a lens.
- As in the shallow depth of field of photographic images, much in the background remains blurred. Jarre compels a reading process that relies on suggestion and understands gaps as narrative tension drivers.
- Recurring motifs (windows, mirrors, lights, cameras) create a seriality reminiscent of photographic image sequences. This not only enables intermedial references but also structures repetition as a poetic device.
- Jarre's language operates with light-dark metaphors whose semantic dimension extends beyond purely visual effects: it stands for psychological states, cognitive processes, and power relations.
This literary-visual structure justifies the concept of intermediality in its most emphatic sense: Jarre's novel goes beyond simple photographic references and creates a medial in-between space in which text and image intertwine. The text is not merely a narrative about photography, but a linguistically organized re-enactment of its mechanisms.
This is to say that the photographer has Léonore, in the department, which is a little complicated. Pour photographer quelque chose, the faut le voir, y avoir accès. Et nous évoluions dans deux mondes d'une difference radicale. Quand nous échangions nos premiers clichés, il semblait que ces derniers montraient deux endroits different. Un œil neutre conviendrait qu'il s'agit deux visions d'un seul lieu physique et de son inframonde. The retrouverait of the details. Il dirait, pas franchement certain, mais pas non plus hostile à l'idée: «Oui, je crois que c'est le meme endroit qu'ont photographié ces deux personnes. »
The universe of photos is located on the campus of March College, along routes that are accessible and located in villages surroundings or certain students who lived there Off campus, by vanité eccentric or manque de Thune. This is simple, the même consigne donnait lieu à des séries de photos sans commune mesure, comme si on nous avait demandé deux rendus différents. And if you don't say anything about the "subjectivity of the photograph", thank you, I don't have anything to do with it. Moi aussi, j'ai suivi photos 101.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
That's why it was initially a bit complicated to talk to Leonore about photography. To photograph something, you have to see it, have access to it. And we were moving in two worlds that were radically different from each other. When we exchanged our first pictures, it seemed as if they showed two different places. A neutral eye would agree that they were two views of a single physical place and its underworld. It would recognize details. It would say, not entirely certain, but not hostilely either, "Yes, I think it's the same place that these two people have photographed."
The world of our photographs was limited to the campus of March College, the roads leading there, and the surrounding villages, where some students like myself lived out of eccentric vanity or lack of money. beyond the campus lived. It was quite simple: the same task led to incomparable photo series, as if we had been asked for two different results. And it wasn't simply a matter of "the photographer's subjectivity"—thank you, I'm not naive either. I, too, have photos 101 .
Audrey Jarre anchors The negatives in a tradition of image and media theory. The most prominent intertextual echo is certainly Roland Barthes' La Chambre claire The concept of the "punctum," which is quoted and explored in detail several times throughout the novel, finds an aesthetic counterpart in Alice's perception of photographic moments. Susan Sontag's critique of the "photographic access" is also evident: the camera as a means of distancing, appropriation, and the exercise of power is a central theme in Alice's relationship with Nathan. Her emotional dependence corresponds to her media representation: as the subject of Nathan's photographs, she is de-subjectified, captured, and reduced. Furthermore, echoes of more recent theorists like Ariella Azoulay can be found, who, in her writings on photographic ethics, describes the "photographic event" as a social construct in which viewer, photographer, and subject are interconnected. Jarre's novel seems to take up this idea: Alice is not only a subject but also a viewer and narrator. The text plays with the multiple positions within the photographic process.
Another intermedial connection lies with film aesthetics: Alice repeatedly refers to her life as a "film," describes herself as a "role," and speaks of "scenes." This language of cinematography lends the text a dual mediality: alongside photography, the moving image also serves as a structuring principle. The novel becomes a sequence of individual images, a fragmented memory. This creates a dynamic network of literature, photography, film, and theory that not only situates Jarre's narrative in the present but also transforms it into a reflection on the conditions of contemporary subjective perception. The negatives It is therefore a genuinely intermedial work that shows how much our self-image depends on images.
Photo series of self-discovery
After a few minutes of inconnus with the creation of the hasard simulacres, it is forced to save one foot plus on the surface. On this base, on guard the best triptyque: the rencontre et the soupçon, the filature, and the goodbye. This is a retrospective history, but this is a different reality. You can also see that you can see part of the images. Jusque-là, je suivais. Les mots, c'est un peu pareil.
Audrey Jarre, The negatives, Scribes, 2025.
After spending thirty minutes with strangers, creating the illusion of coincidence, one inevitably knew a little more about them. Based on this, one would maintain the best triptych: the encounter and the suspicion, the surveillance, and then the farewell. It was meant to tell a story in retrospect, even if it differed from reality. With pictures, one can tell whatever one wants. Up to that point, I followed. It's similar with words.
The negatives is not just a novel about a relationship or a year abroad, but a radical reflection on the subject in the age of images. The tripartite structure in Alice, Negatives, Prints It is not merely structural, but poetological: it follows the movement from posing through disappearance to the development of a self-perception. Jarre stages literary writing as a counter-image to photographic fixation. Her novel is a kind of photographic album, but one with notes, doubts, and blank pages. It is a work about becoming visible in a world dominated by gazes, and about the possibility of escaping these gazes—not through invisibility, but through writing itself. Read in this way, The negatives A study informed by image theory and intermediality about the tension between identity and representation, about the negative as a form of truth, and about literature as a place of development: not in the sense of progress, but in the sense of the exposed paper that floats in the liquid, slowly reveals itself, and is never quite finished.
Audrey Jarres The negatives is an intimate, intelligent, and linguistically sensitive text about young people searching for themselves in a world of images. The novel portrays a generation that defines itself through visibility, yet remains perpetually alienated from its own image. Jarre's narrative is both poetic and political: it questions power, the gaze, and the role of art in a world where everything seems capable of being aestheticized. Les négatifs is not just a novel about a relationship, but about a culture that constantly generates images and, in doing so, threatens to dissolve its subjects.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
