Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, February – March 2024
This exhibition brings together the writing of Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, with photographs from MEP’s collection. Known for her writings on social and intimate emancipation, Ernaux has become a major intellectual reference for a diverse and cross-generational readership. the younger generation. The exhibition was developed in discussion with the writer.
Ernaux has a long interest in photography, and in her book Exteriors – a record of day-to-day happenings around Cergy-Pontoise from 1985 to 1992 – she refers to trying to write as if making images: “to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.” The exhibition pays homage to Ernaux’s goal, by treating her words as photographs and displaying them on the gallery walls.
The images that appear alongside Ernaux’s “snapshots” are not illustrative, but instead selected for a shared ethos: an interest in the quotidian and a desire to give permanence to things that exist ephemerally. “What is it I am desperately seeking in reality? Is it meaning?” Ernaux asks. “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…(Sitting opposite someone in the Métro, I often ask myself, ‘Why am I not that woman?’)”
Artists: Barbara Alper, Jean-Christophe Béchet, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Marguerite Bornhauser, Mohamed Bourouissa, Harry Callahan, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Claude Dityvon, Martine Franck, Luigi Ghirri, Yingguang Guo, Clarisse Hahn, Hiro, Richard Kalvar · Ihei Kimura · William Klein · Dolorès Marat · Daido Moriyama Marie-Paule Nègre · Janine Niepce · Mika Ninagawa · Tony Ray-Jones · Ursula Schulz-Dornburg · Issei Suda · Johan Van der Keuken · Kheng-Li Wee · Henry Wessel · Garry Winogrand · Bernard Pierre Wolff
The exhibition is the product of a residency conducted by the curator and writer Lou Stoppard in April 2022, which focused on using the MEP collection as a catalyst for new research and for linking photography to other mediums.