Extérieurs : Annie Ernaux et la photographie

Extérieurs : Annie Ernaux et la photographie – Annie Ernaux & la Photographie celebrates the close relationship between photography and the writing of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, with texts from her book “Journal du dehors” (1993) and photographs from the MEP collection. The exhibition is the fruit of a residency led by curator and writer Lou Stoppard in May 2022. For a month, she drew on the MEP collection for a research project linking photography and literature.

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.