Annie Ernaux and Photography. Mackbook Editions March 2024. Silkscreened hardcover with tipped-in image
15 x 21cm, 144 pages

Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writing of Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux with photographs from Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s collection by photographers including Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, and Daidō Moriyama. 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 reflects on the profound ways word and image can inform and inflect one another.

‘My intention was to compare Ernaux’s texts with photographs … I was intrigued by what this process would reveal about how we approach literature, as opposed to photography … Do we presume that texts can never capture the same sense of reality as photographs, cannot be ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ (to use words that Ernaux favours)? What does it mean to see ‘as if through the eyes of a photographer’? And, could you say that in Exteriors Ernaux was actually making images, rather than writing texts?’ Lou Stoppard (writer and curator).

‘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.