The late French writer and artist convinced his eccentric relatives to star in a gothic photo novel which is finally being published in English following renewed interest in his work

In 1974, Hervé Guibert, a precocious 18-year-old fledgling artist, asked his great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise, if he could make a film about them. The pair lived a life of reclusive eccentricity in a Parisian hôtel particulier (grand urban house) in the 15th arrondissement alongside a pampered German shepherd guard dog called Whysky. Though Guibert was one of their very few regular visitors, they dismissed his suggestion outright. Undaunted, he wrote a play based on their life – it was never produced – and took hundreds of photographs of them, mostly from across the table at their regular lunches.

“Everything began to take off when I began to print some photos just to see, to show them,” he recalls in a passage from Suzanne and Louise , a roman-photo (photo novel) that first appeared in a French edition in 1980 and is about to be published for the first time in English. Surprised and flattered by what they saw, the sisters agreed to be the subjects of a more ambitious project in which Guibert required them to pose more formally and even act out vignettes that reflected their intertwined lives.