About this Event
Join us for an evening of conversation, imagery and soundscape to celebrate the launch of Exteriors — Annie Ernaux and Photography. Featuring Lou Stoppard, Lauren Elkin and Alice Blackhurst in conversation.
‘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, celebrates the close relationship between photography and the writing of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, through texts from her book Exteriors (Journal du dehors), 1993, and photographs from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie collection.
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’, Exteriors 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.
Lou Stoppard is a British writer and curator. She has written for The Financial Times, Aperture, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her books include a survey of the work of street photographer Shirley Baker, published by Mack in 2019, 'Pools', an exploration of swimming in photography, published by Rizzoli in 2020, and Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, published by Mack in 2024, to time with an exhibition of the same name at MEP, Paris.
Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute (inspired in part by Annie Ernaux's Journal du dehors) and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Frieze, Art Review, Harper's, Aperture, Tate Etc, and the New York Times, where she has profiled artists like Cornelia Parker and Sutapa Biswas, and she has contributed to catalogues for artists including Sarah Lucas, Lubaina Himid, Vlatka Horvat, Hannah Starkey, and Caroline Walker. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables; upcoming translations include Constance Debré's Nom and Marie-Laure Bernadac's biography of Louise Bourgeois. Her next book, a novel entitled Scaffolding, will be published by Chatto & Windus in June 2024.
Alice Blackhurst is a writer, critic and researcher and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image, 2021. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, n+1, British Vogue, The New Left Review Sidecar and The Washington Post. Last year, she interviewed and profiled Annie Ernaux for The Observer New Review.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Reference Point, 2 Arundel Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00