Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography

‘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