ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that the conception of the self and the other in La Recherche is intimately linked to the way the text uses real and 'mental' photography. As the main interest of this concerns the mutual influence between self and other, consider those passages where the narrator's relationship to his two love objects, the grandmother and Albertine, are configured through the uses of photography. While so far the investigative process of unravelling and reshaping identities via photography has been described as irritating, surprising or pleasurable, in the relationship between the narrator and his grandmother it becomes threatening. In the case of the grandmother seeing can be translated into knowing and the resurrection of the grandmother's true nature via involuntary memory enables Marcel to finally realize her loss. In the Marcel-grandmother narrative the relation between the self and the other is first of all understood as that of mutual completion.
