What happens when sharp, gritty arts of different forms come together? Rubbing could cause them to ring, rub, or turn into even tighter. All this happens in a dense, fascinating show that author Lou Stoppard prepared along with Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux at the Parisian Museum. European House of Photography (MEP).
Stoppard was writer-in-residence at the European Parliament in 2022, and the exhibition Exteriors: Annie Ernaux & Photography is the culmination of this era. The play relies on the pages of Ernaux’s thin book Du Hors Journal (1993) and juxtaposes them with photos from the collection of a Member of the European Parliament, suggesting possible threads, resonances and affinities.
Journal Du Dehors Ernaux was translated by Tanya Leslie as Outside and published by Fitzcarraldo in 2021. The text takes the form of random diary entries spanning seven years, from the Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties. It focuses on fleeting encounters that took place during Ernaux’s regular trips to the city from his home on the outskirts of Paris.
The addition of images and separation of pages in the exhibition intensifies Ernaux’s work, creating plenty of content for visitors to take into consideration. But the images also add space to interpret Ernaux’s writing. The routine of the each day commute to work, the unchanging underground corridors with familiar beggars, the same car parking zone in front of the same supermarket – these are the patterns of our lives to work that give the Ernaux Diary a special corrosion.
Ernaux’s works gain additional shine and serenity when read from the panels on the wall. The paradoxical qualities of her writing in Exteriors, the sense of timeless tragedy, in addition to the transience of the scenes captured, turn into much more clear in the photos. This moment, this dress, these words, these socks exist on this time and place, but because they’re captured, in addition they exist ceaselessly.
Cutting images
Ernaux has long wanted her writing to work like a knife. Her style is brief, spare and non-lyrical. He gets to the heart of the things he writes about, in every word essential. And the poised, thoughtful curation of this show is an extension of her hairstyling skills. It shows us that the whole lot is in the details, if you happen to capture them sharply enough to disclose their meaning. Many of the photos displayed alongside her words are stunning on this regard.
They are characterised almost overwhelmingly by what the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “” – scenes noticed and captured from the street, capturing people without their knowledge, capturing their unique presence in that moment. One particularly successful combination shows how this approach can generate splendidly different images.
Dolores Marat
On one side of the narrow, corridor-like gallery are a series of small, clear photos by the American photographer Harry Callahan, taken from the French Archive series from the Fifties. These almost black prints are overexposed with stripes of sunlight or just minimally speckled. The figures appear enigmatically etched against the background light, fading out and in of view.
On the other wall hangs a wonderful montage by a Japanese-American photographer Hiro. These images are life-size and depict cramped commuters on a Sixties Tokyo train in unwanted exposure through the carriage windows, their gazes and fingers pressed against the glass, reaching out to us. So on one side of the gallery there’s a deep sense of loneliness. On the other hand, people’s pressure on us.
Y. Hiro Wakabayashi’s estate
Together, these photographers make clear the strange quality of this phase of Ernaux’s work, which was consistently near peculiar life and yet at the same time detached. She at all times looks from a distance, even when she imagines that this stuff are so peculiar that she might as well be herself.
Distanced viewer
The inclusion of several series of works by Japanese photographers is striking since it creates a way of alienation in contrast to the way through which Ernaux systematically embraced the familiarity of peculiar French life. Photographs from more moderen Parisian times have the same effect, especially in the room with two large works by Mohamed Bourouissa and one by Marguerite Bornhauser, the only work in the exhibition that doesn’t depict people.
Mohamed Bourouiss/Mennour, Paris
Two engravings by Bourouissa depict scenes from black life in France. One shows a bunch of 4 young people standing around a burnt-out automobile in a unclean alley. One of them stands on the roof, his upper torso and head severed by the doorframe.
The second photo shows an arrested man. He is handcuffed, almost naked, staring blankly at a lady who could also be his girlfriend. He is on bare feet and wearing only a protracted T-shirt. A policeman and a lady are also beheaded consequently of Bourouissa’s frame-up.
Meanwhile, Bornhauser’s work shows the bullet hitting the glass somewhere nearby Attacks in Paris in 2015 after terrorist attacks.
These are scenes of contemporary violence and social collapse. They show that even the minimal social and physical mobility of the Ernaux generation has run aground. They also highlight the violence in Ernaux’s work, particularly on the pages next to Bourouissa’s paintings. These pages are less documentation of what she saw, but extrapolations of what may need happened. They speak of fear, of empty spaces where violence (even rape) can go unnoticed, and of the cruelty of parental ambition that causes misery in adolescence.
All in all, the viewer feels the extraordinary power of these images of on a regular basis life. And for many who have already got an admiration for Ernaux, Exteriors is a likelihood to higher see how she sharpened her eyesight and hearing in the face of the routine of the each day commute.
