Annie Ernaux and Photography, Lou Stoppard (ed.), Mack, 2024
‘Committing to paper the movements, postures, and words of the people I meet gives me the illusion that I am close to them. I don’t speak to them, I only watch them and listen to them. Yet the emotions they arouse in me are real. I may also be trying to discover something about myself through them, their attitudes or their conversations. (Sitting opposite someone in the Métro, I often ask myself, “Why am I not that woman?”)’ Annie Ernaux
Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writing of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with photographs from Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s collection by photographers including Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, Daidō Moriyama, Janine Niépce, Issei Suda, Henry Wessel, and Bernard Pierre Wolff.
Taking Ernaux’s unique artistic endeavour to ‘describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered’, this project by writer and curator Lou Stoppard uncovers the profound ways the written and visual image can inform and inflect on one another. In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms.
Accompanies an exhibition at MEP, Paris, opening on 28 February 2024.
Available in two editions: French and English. The extracts of discussion that punctuate the essay in this book are from a conversation between Lou Stoppard and Annie Ernaux, which took place at Ernaux’s home in Cergy-Pontoise on 11 April 2022.
Extract
This book and its corresponding exhibition are an attempt to analyse Ernaux beyond the context of literature, an arena she seems keen to reject in the first place – in A Woman’s Story, her 1988 history of her mother’s life, she famously states that she wants her writing to be ‘a cut below literature’ – placing her into the world of photography, where questions of immediacy, reality, physicality, evidence (all aspirations in Ernaux’s writing), are already central.
Ernaux’s goal of writing photographically is stated plainly in Exteriors, yet in rereading Ernaux’s other books during my residency I began to believe it was a broad and nuanced pre- occupation across her work. I later felt this with certainty when reading her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2022. ‘Finding the words that contain both reality and the sensation provided by reality would become, and remain to this day, my ongoing concern in writing’, she said. She talked of trying to decipher ‘the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it’. This, she said, serves to ‘upend its established order, upset its hierarchies’.
After this lecture, I began to notice that literary critics were, consciously or subconsciously, using language related to photography to describe Ernaux’s writing – a style she describes as ‘flat’ – even when not specifically connecting her to the medium.
‘She snaps a portrait of the Norman poor: customs, sayings, hates, laws’, describes one article written in relation to Ernaux’s 1997 book Shame, an account of an episode of violence during her childhood when her usually docile father attempted to kill her mother. A piece titled ‘Annie Ernaux Turns Memory Into Art’ talked of her trying to write to ‘make things exist’. (A photograph is, of course, a tangible object, a memento of sorts). And later, the suggestion that Ernaux’s works are ‘books that try to stop time’.
Is that not exactly what a photograph does? Stop time…
….. I began to interpret in Ernaux’s writing a sense that photography could sometimes do what writing couldn’t, or, more accu- rately, could do what writing ought to be able to do – describe things ‘as they were’. (‘It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing’, Ernaux writes in A Girl’s Story. Her task, she says, is to ‘explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped’. Could photography keep this ‘stupefying reality’ alive? When reading Ernaux I often thought of the well-known Susan Sontag line: ‘Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.’ I sensed in Ernaux a belief in that notion – I felt her quest as a writer was to toil until she had defied probability and conjured up such ‘pieces’.