The Photographer Who Made Absence Her Muse

Alix Cléo Roubaud lived her life on the threshold, in states of in-between. Born in Mexico in 1952, she grew up in a nomadic means. Her father was a Canadian diplomat, and as a baby she moved steadily. The household left Mexico when she was 4, biking via year-long stints in Egypt and South Africa earlier than returning to Canada after which setting off once more for postings in Portugal and Greece. She had an unplaceable accent, no clear first language. She spent her profession, if one can name it that, in a state of transition—a perpetual state of changing into a photographer. She achieved no actual success, being rejected by varied galleries and critics earlier than her dying from a pulmonary embolism at thirty-one. She spent years of her youth questioning if she could be a poet or a novelist or a thinker, and even after making the selection to focus firmly on images in 1978 she generally discovered herself, particularly when confronted with dismissal, returning to ideas of another, completely different path.

Alix Cléo Roubaud, Venise, le 27 avril 1979–Paris, le 14 juillet 1979, 1979

Alix Cléo Roubaud, Untitled, 1980

Roubaud favored to work in the course of the evening. Her journal describes a principally nocturnal darkroom schedule: getting back from events and printing from three to 6 within the morning, or 5 to eleven. She referred to as these hours “my private night.” After her 1980 marriage to the celebrated poet Jacques Roubaud, some twenty years her senior, she lived between the marital dwelling and her personal separate condominium one avenue away in Paris, transferring backwards and forwards, between happiness and despair, marital achievement (the pair typically shared moments of intimacy as he was waking up for the day, and he or she was lastly settling all the way down to mattress) and a cycle of affection affairs, togetherness and solitude. She was typically drunk, typically depressed—each states that enable for a basic detachment from the world. To her, dwelling was arduous and filled with mysterious, irreconcilable dimensions. Her photos mirror this. Writing of an ideal summer time day, a transparent sky, a swimming pool, she remembered a latest suicide try and famous “the reasons for living have no overlap with the reasons for death.”

Alix Cléo Roubaud, Untitled (Correction of perspective in my bed room), 1980

Alix Cléo Roubaud, The Last Room, Ottawa 1973–Paris 1979, 1979

In 1980, Roubaud wrote in her journal a thought directed to her husband: “Would that we could be the dark-room for one another.” The journal is an odd, slippery doc: a semipublic, semi-private endeavor that was each private diary and rolling letter to her husband, although he was forbidden from studying it in her lifetime. It was, he wrote in his introduction to the components of it he revealed in 1984, her “secret expression.” (The paradox of this phrase, given his resolution to publish, additional complicates the doc’s already uncommon standing and intentions).

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The e-book, Alix’s Journal, has come to be the best-known factor about her—alongside the movie Les pictures d’Alix (Alix’s Pictures, 1980) by her good friend Jean Eustache, which received the 1982 César Award for Best Short Film—giving Roubaud a notability that eluded her in her lifetime, regardless of the very fact it represents solely a small fragment of her life. Roubaud had saved a journal from adolescence, however her husband selected to publish solely the later entries written between 1979 and 1983, throughout their relationship, thus framing her inside the confines of their marriage. Our understanding of her life stays stunted, filled with misunderstandings, secrets and techniques, and confusions, very like the inside world she inhabited and pictured. Her images supply visions which are dizzying and sliding: a wine glass spilling a number of instances, a floating face, a dissolving physique, nothing ever fairly what it appears. In Alix’s Pictures, Roubaud sits in her condominium and describes her images to a younger man, Eustache’s son. Gradually her phrases depart from the pictures we see on-screen. A shoe is described as a self-portrait, a pillow as a lovely physique. The viewer is left confused, pissed off, amused, not sure of precisely at what level issues fell out of sync.

Alix Cléo Roubaud, Non contact principle, 1980–81

Alix Cléo Roubaud, The mom’s eyes, 1981

Roubaud’s thought to her husband is a fancy assertion: A darkroom is a solitary area, the place one retreats, hidden. But it’s also an area outlined by emergence—by an activation of kinds, as issues, photos, change into open, actual, dwelling. Roubaud referred to negatives as being like a “painter’s palette” and generally spent as much as ten hours on a single print, reveling within the chemical course of. Writing in Alix Cléo Roubaud: A Portrait in Fragments (2024), Hélène Giannecchini—who as director of the Alix Cléo Roubaud Foundation has carried out a lot to arrange the work and writings right into a coherent archive and convey new consideration to the photographer’s apply—describes her methods as various and bold, making use of inks in chemical baths and utilized toners, and even scratching her negatives or drawing straight on the print’s floor. “For Alix the darkroom was a crucial step in the material and symbolic making of a photograph,” she writes. “Everything that happened before that was of little importance. The quality of a photograph depended very little on the shot itself. It was at the developing and printing stage that Alix came close to the final work.” “I told you,” Roubaud herself wrote, “I want to make everything come up to the surface.”

As objects, images typically reveal themselves like secrets and techniques unearthed—bolts of knowledge or reminiscence, stumbled upon in “biscuit boxes or chocolate boxes, photographs in brown envelopes,” as Roubaud wrote in her journal of discovering a trove of her husband’s childhood household images. But they spark mysteries too. What is it that they depict? Not the long run, not the previous. As Roubaud herself put it, “When you see this, it will no longer be.” As quickly because the picture is made, the scene or individual it depicts is gone, misplaced, already completed, already lifeless, ungraspable.

Roubaud was by no means formally educated—she accomplished a single brief course on the images college in Arles—however was already pondering the conundrums of the medium from a younger age. Writing in a letter to a childhood good friend at age fourteen, her phrases are probing and startingly mature, anticipating her later voice and magnificence. She describes receiving a brand new {photograph} of her good friend, grown-up, taller, extra stunning than she remembered: “And faced with an image on a piece of paper, my eyes falter, stubbornly persist, try desperately to come to terms with the mobile reality that it represents. Weary of this futile effort, I tuck the photo away into my purse, unsatisfied.”

Alix Cléo Roubaud, Two sisters who aren’t sisters, 1980

Alix Cléo Roubaud, Pornographie bourgeoise, 1981
All images courtesy Estate of Alix Cléo Roubaud and Galerie Buchholz

This article initially appeared in Aperture No. 263, “Secrets.”