This book is composed of photographic sequences from erotic and pornographic novels of the 70s and early 80s. The selection focuses on the first introductory pages of these magazines. The selected scenes, without real erotic stakes for the reader since deprived of all naked pictures, install the frame of the action and set up the plot, as thin and pretext as they are.

The book thus deals with these photographic sequences which illustrate, before the explicit scenes expected, a period of latency during which the urges seem not to arise. These sequences, often more narrative than the sometimes confusing series that follow them, provoke an interest in the reader inversely proportional to the visual impact of the scenes they introduce.

The photographs in question are then nothing more than pretext images : unloved and dispensable, scarcely touched by the reader who turns the pages, eager for more licentious content. These images which illustrate these scenes of life overplayed by actors of which it is not the specialty, disappear even from the magazine, from the point of view of the reader. The viewer denies their existence by paying attention to them: the co-construction between the support and the viewer required for the emergence of a mental image is barely established. By their extremely minor place in the series of images that constitutes the photo novel, these photographs are not viewed or projected in the mind of the viewer. These are images that are only glimpsed, "a-perceived", that we forget. Images that hardly cross the frontiers of consciousness. These are ghost images.

Paradoxically, the accumulation of his gost photographs illustrating scenes of exposure provokes tensions and excitement through absence, the waiting for the conclusion that never comes and the frustration that results. The absence of a graphic scene, of course, but also the absence of intrinsic meaning of the sketches, emptied of any utility by the amputation of the scenes that should succeed them. It is the active imagination, conditioned by the accumulation, the title and the subtext of the selection, that re-tense each photograph and finally give them a meaning and a particular interest.