Author Annie Ernaux’s works are dropped at photographic life in Paris

‘I felt the urge to transcribe the scenes,’ writes French writer Annie Ernaux in her 2021 e-book Exteriors, which takes the type of random journal entries and received the Nobel Prize in Literature the next yr. ‘Phrases and gestures of unknown individuals, who’re by no means to be seen once more, graffiti scribbled on partitions, no sooner dry than swiftly erased; sentences overheard on the radio and information objects learn within the papers. Something that, indirectly or one other, moved me, upset me or angered me.’

The product of an April 2022 analysis residency by curator and author Lou Stoppard, the brand new images exhibition ‘Exteriors’ at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (till 25 Could 2024) presents a thought of exploration of the connection between Ernaux’s written works and photographic mediums. Spanning from the Nineteen Forties to 2021 and international locations together with France, the USA, Italy, Japan, Singapore and the UK, the showcased pictures convey to life the common themes prevalent in Ernaux’s writing and the juxtaposition between public façades and personal realities. 

‘Exteriors’ explores Annie Ernaux’s writing via images

Via the work of famend photographers together with Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, Daido Moriyama, Janine Niepce, Issei Suda, Henry Wessel, and Bernard Pierre Wolff, the exhibition vividly emboldens Ernaux’s experiments in describing ‘actuality as via the eyes of a photographer’, preserving ‘the thriller and opacity of the lives’ she encounters. 

As a lot of the e-book Exteriors is noticed from trains, the pictures within the exhibition concentrate on these fleeting, transitory moments between coming and going. Hiro’s Shinjuku Station, Tokyo (1962) exhibits commuters packed on a practice like sardines, pressed in opposition to each other, their gaze turned outwards. Schulz-Dornburg’s Ploshchad Vosstaniya – Rebellion Sq., Saint-Petersbourg (2005) and Marat’s La femme aux gants (Girl with gloves) (1987) see figures taking place an escalator at metro stations.

For Ernaux, these websites function assembly factors for all walks of life to briefly intersect with each other. The work of photographers Garry Winogrand, Luigi Ghirri, Richard Kalvar, and William Klein equally options supermarkets, hairdressers, and cafés, reconfiguring Ernaux’s observations of the on a regular basis rituals of journey and consumption right into a poignant inquiry into class and gender efficiency. 

Maybe, although, probably the most compelling side of ‘Exteriors’ is the pictures’ ephemerality; how they seize individuals and locations at pivotal cut-off dates. Marguerite Bornhauser’s picture of damaged glass, for example, exhibits the aftermath of the Paris terror assaults in 2015. This darkish undercurrent echoes all through the present – within the case of Mohamed Bourouissa’s L’deadlock (2007), his work exhibits the unusual dissonance between totally different city areas and Parisian suburbs. 

As with Ernaux’s e-book, the pictures of ‘Exteriors’ invoke a suggestion of comparability of ourselves via how we view others. We would finest consider the curatorial interaction between phrase and picture because the product of flâuner-ism. ‘It appears to me that inside this work, pictures aren’t handled as a topic or immediate,’ says Stoppard. ‘As an alternative, the texts appear to really change into pictures; objects, inside a body, which the reader – or viewer – can each observe and step into. One is each distant and concerned, seeing and imagining, current and recalling.’