“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” – Roland Barthes

Marcel Proust turns away. His head is straight but not quite obscured. It could be considered a picture in profile if not for the angle of his body, crumpled and creating the illusion of multiple positions. His hand weakly grips his lapel, the reaction of solid determination to not let memories break him.

I am on my third book of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past depending on the translation (À la recherché du temps perdu), and already I feel compelled to write and discuss its moods, places and memories. Though resisting reading him for a brief time, coming across a particular portrait of the writer turning away crumbled the last any resistance. For here in one photo is much of the material I have so far read; over a thousand pages in fact, seemingly shot through the prism of this one, very particular image. Within it, I feel that what Proust saw and scribbled down when lying in bed, is captured; like a permanent zoetrope of lost loves, social calamities and artistic endeavours.

So far, Proust has been sent back into his memories. As soon as this action took place, that temporal sway backwards and forwards between mistakes and hindsight, I imagined the writer looking up and away. I could not place what it was specifically he was turning away from, but there was a sense that looking back meant something was put aside; as if one door opened only if willing to close another. It was not a sense of the present that was closed off, for with the present provided the hindsight afforded which makes the novel astounding and wise.

Much is said about wisdom, as if wisdom has some tangible currency, but it genuinely is the best way to describe what is on the page. Proust not only accepts his past errors – so far, his place of faith in high society that simply bores him with its ineffectuality – but positively dives into them and scours them for detail. He must be totally certain that his search for any sort of meaning for existence does not lie there in the great pompous salons of Paris.

Proust is looking back and, by doing so, has turned away from the present places. The photograph, and photography in general, is fitting for the writer. The best editions of the book understand this hazy, sepia memory and make use of it in their design (the recent Penguin modern classics editions, for example) while the worst, intimidated by the scope of the work, vie for easy abstraction instead (the previous Vintage editions). But photography, and this photograph in particular, understand the necessity and desire to keep memory alive. To turn away briefly back into the grain and fading light is a shared strength of photography and Proust.

Which direction is Proust really looking then? For philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, it is all encompassing, neither backwards nor forwards, simply a wider, full breadth of perception. Madeleines are ‘redundant’ according to the writer. Proust can only turn in circles rather than look back and away. But the photograph shows him turning away, though not quite fully, but neither is he facing us.

There are other photos, of course. Plenty in fact of the young man smiling towards camera, posing with family, or enjoying a Normandy view. But I return to this photo, its decorated chair, its elegance and simplicity, and wonder what the man could see; whether his vision is a temporal 360 degree curve that renders his angle inconsequential, or something even deeper. We, the viewer and the reader, can recognise its turn away, but memories may have mirrored walls curving down to the ground. All may be potentially perceived.

Perhaps then, it is ultimately the reader that Proust is turning away from. It is not a negative aspect or done so in haste, but he is instead enmeshed in the problems of this wider perception of which the reader is only a small fraction.

‘Do not regard me,’ he is saying, ‘look to that and to this and to beyond all.’ This may seem ironic considering the writer’s desire to somehow help his readers, fulfilling the role that his father, the distanced medical man, ordained and was never quite satisfied with. Proust is signalling our direction of interest and that is enough. This lone action opens up everything.

At first we feel to be looking back with him over his shoulders, a sleight of hand distraction for what seems a back-and-forth wander through the memories of one man. But the real memory, the all encompassing one, is in the act of writing itself; in a musky bed, surrounded by scrolls of text in which everything can and will be present. For that is life in hindsight, whether looked in the eye or turned ever so slightly away.