Hervé Guibert

1955, Saint-Cloud, France - 1991, Clamard, France

Presentation

Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault, and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France toward AIDS. First published by Régine Desforges in 1977, Hervé Guibert, who wrote in the wake of Jean Genet, Hermann Ungar and Thomas Bernhard, also produced an important body of photographs, which was exhibited in 2011 as a retrospective by the Maison européenne de la photographie.

In Ghost Image, a book whose subject is photography and in which no photographs appear, Guibert offers a singular look at this art form. La pudeur ou l’impudeur, Guibert’s only film, follows the last months of his life in plenary detail. Hervé Guibert died at the age of 36 in Paris. His journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, spanning the last fifteen years of his life, were published posthumously and published in an English translation in 2014 (Nightboat Books).

Biography

Press