By ANNATERESS FABRIS*
Just like photographers attentive to the spectacle of everyday life, the writer demonstrates the ability to deal with aspects of mass civilization in a detached but no less critical way.
Published in 1993, Journal of the back did not include the preface added by Annie Ernaux in the paperback edition released in 1996. In it, the writer described what it meant to live in a “new city,” in which “the marks of the past and history” were not inscribed. Arriving in a place “that had come out of nowhere in a few years, devoid of all memory, with buildings spread across an immense territory, with uncertain boundaries” had been a “disturbing experience. I was submerged in a feeling of strangeness, unable to see anything beyond the windy terraces, the pink or blue cement facades, the deserted streets of the housing projects. The constant impression of floating between heaven and earth, in a no man's land. My gaze was similar to the glass walls of office buildings, which reflected no one, only the towers and the clouds.”
Little by little, Annie Ernaux emerged from her “schizophrenia” and began to enjoy life in a “cosmopolitan corner, surrounded by lives that began elsewhere, in a French province, in Vietnam, in the Maghreb or on the Ivory Coast – like mine in Normandy”. Her acceptance of the place led her to observe it closely. She became interested in the children’s games, the way people walked through the corridors of the Trois-Fontaines shopping centre, the passengers at the bus shelters, the conversations she overheard on the RER, the regional train that connected Cergy-Le Haut to Marne-la-Vallée-Chessy, passing through Paris. This acceptance awakened in her the desire to “transcribe scenes, gestures of anonymous people, […], graffiti on the walls, erased as soon as they were written. Everything that, in one way or another, provoked an emotion, a restlessness or revolt in me”.
These circumstances are the basis of the diary from abroad, which should not be considered a report, an investigation of urban sociology, but rather “an attempt to reach the reality of an era – this modernity of which a new city provides the acute feeling without us being able to define it – through a collection of snapshots of collective daily life”.
The writer seeks the signs of this modernity in manifestations that may seem innocuous or devoid of meaning: the way people look at their purchases at the supermarket checkout, the words used to order a cut of meat or to appreciate a painting, all reveal “desires and frustrations, sociocultural inequalities.” Therefore, she concludes: “The sensation and reflection aroused by places or objects are independent of their cultural value, and the supermarket offers as much meaning and human truth as the concert hall.”
The objective of the undertaking is highlighted in the penultimate paragraph: “I avoided, as far as possible, putting myself on stage and expressing the emotion that is at the origin of each text. On the contrary, I tried to practice a kind of photographic writing of reality, in which the intersecting existences would preserve their opacity and their enigma. (Later, seeing the photographs that Paul Strand took of the inhabitants of an Italian village, Luzzano, photographs that impress with their violent, almost painful presence – the beings are there, simply there –, I would think I was faced with an ideal, inaccessible, of writing)”.
At the end of the preface, Annie Ernaux ends up recognizing that she put a lot of herself into this peculiar diary: obsessions and memories that determined “unconsciously the choice of the word, of the scene to be recorded”. In light of this, she states that it is possible to discover oneself in the act of projecting oneself into the outside world, because it is “the anonymous others encountered on the subway, in waiting rooms who, through the interest, anger or shame with which they cross our path, awaken our memory and reveal ourselves to us”.
This brief introductory text requires some considerations that will help to better understand the meaning of the diary. In 1975, the writer went to live in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town officially created on August 11, 1972, on the banks of the Oise River, which encompassed the village of Cergy, whose existence has been documented since the XNUMXth century, and the city of Pontoise, which boasts more than two thousand years of history.
Therefore, the lack of memory and history must be attributed exclusively to the new city, organized in a horseshoe shape, still under construction today and whose main landmarks are the administrative and business district, dominated by the inverted pyramid of the city hall building, designed by the architect Henry Bernard, and the Eixo Maior, designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan.
In her diary, Annie Ernaux refers, in passing, to the sun setting between “the crisscrossing bars of the pillars that descended towards the center of the New Town,” to the village butcher’s shop, located below the new urban configuration, and to the Hédiard emporium, “in the neighborhood of chic stores,” because her attention is drawn, above all, to the people she meets in supermarkets, shopping centers, department stores, on the regional train, and on the subway, which allow her to construct an unvarnished portrait of contemporary society.
The diary, as Catherine Rannoux-Wespel explains, was not conceived as such; it gradually became the text published in 1993 through successive attempts and shifts and a long interrogation. The final product is the result of three sets: a sheaf of papers containing observations and notes on the experience of life in Cergy-Pontoise; notes relating to the project of a novel entitled The new city, still in gestation in 1982, when Annie Ernaux began the “autosociobiographical” project with the writing of The place, published the following year,[1] and fragments, almost all dated, which will be transposed with variations in the edited text.
Among the three sets, the first is the most intimate; it contains notes on the immensity, the lack of depth, the desert, the silence and the wind, the loss of the body. In it, the author draws a parallel between the construction sites of the modern city and the “Western”, futuristic films (“worse than Alphaville[2]”) and the ruins.
Faced with the “impossibility of narrative”, Annie Ernaux resorts to fragments, which refer to evidence and are in tune with the “city in pieces”. The diary itself begins in 1984 and contains notes, on loose sheets, about what she sees on the train, on the street, and in the shopping malls of Cergy-Pontoise and Paris. The experience of the modern city does not produce regular notes and finally arrives at a type of writing associated with the collective dimension and anonymity. The social universe of modern life is leitmotiv of the diary and reflections on the literary question give way to the problem of the social function of the writer.
The diary does indeed contain several reflections on literature. A brief note in parentheses, “(I realize that I always look for the signs of literature in reality),” dated 1986, is followed shortly afterwards by an observation about the characterization of the figure of the writer through external signs. The statements that a writer must have a cat or a notebook give rise to a somewhat disheartened comment: “Writing, then, is not enough; external signs are needed, material proofs to define the writer, the ‘real’ one, when these signs are accessible to everyone.”
In a note from 1989, Annie Ernaux describes a scene she witnessed on the subway that led her to establish a connection with her writing practice: a young couple alternated between verbal violence and caresses, as if they were alone in the carriage. This is a false impression, because from time to time they look at the passengers in a defiant manner. “A terrible impression,” the author notes, concluding, “I tell myself that this is what literature is for me.”
After witnessing a “rhetorical exercise” at the Charles-de-Gaulle-Étoile station between a drunk and a somewhat lost man, Ernaux attempts a declaration of principles on how to portray “real facts”. They can be reported “precisely, in their brutality, in their instantaneous aspect, outside of any narrative”, or they can be saved to “make them (eventually) ‘useful’, to be included in a whole (a novel, for example)”. The fragments recorded in the diary leave her unsatisfied, because she needs to “feel engaged in a long and constructed work (not subject to the chance of days and encounters)”. At the same time, however, she is aware that she cannot help but “transcribe the scenes of the RER, the gestures and words of people in themselves, without them being of any use”.
This last observation, which encapsulates the relationship between Ernaul's writing and photography, leads us to revisit what she wrote about Paul Strand. Motivated by the photographs that make up the book A country (1955), set in Luzzara (not Luzzano), the hometown of Cesare Zavattini, the author of the texts, Ernaux demonstrates his appreciation for the photographer's “dynamic realism.” With this term, Paul Strand defended a type of militant realism, based on the dialectical relationship between the general and the particular and on the metaphorical quality of the image, far removed from both impartial recording and the search for the exceptional or sensational.
What really interested him was capturing “normal subjects,” capturing the way of life of a country in a street or a kitchen corner. The “presence” that attracts Ernaux is determined by the abandonment of any heroic narrative and the choice of a simple type of portrait: his models were captured in frontal poses, against neutral backgrounds and framed by a tiny portion of space.[3]
In an interview given on the occasion of the exhibition Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography, presented in European House of Photography between February 28 and May 26 of this year, the writer again mentions Paul Strand's name, but replaces the reference to A country by another undertaking: France in profile (1952). Gondeville’s Portrait of a Young Peasant (1951) prompts the same kind of reflection as in 1996: these are images that express “being there”. The observer knows nothing about the models, who carry within themselves “a force, an enigma”. Ernault openly declares that he was looking for something similar in the capture of reality attempted in the diary: “It is clear from the title that this was happening abroad. That it was possible to discover an absolutely incredible wealth: the abroad”.
Reading the British translation of the diary, which was titled Exteriors, had sparked in curator Lou Stoppard the idea of researching the relationship between Annie Ernaux and photography. To further the project, the curator held a curatorial residency at the European House of Photography, the final result of which was this year's exhibition.
In the report of this experiment, Stoppard explains the reasons that led her to take Journal of the back as a paradigm for the analysis of the question that was at the center of his interests. While in other writings by Ernaux images play the role of themes or instigators, in the diary it is the texts that seem “to become photographs, objects in a frame that the reader or ‘spectator’ can at once observe and penetrate. Simultaneously distant and implicated, the reader-spectator sees and imagines, is present and remembers. And yet he does nothing more than encounter a scene, an image.”
Stimulated by the reading, Stoppard asks what would happen if she compared the texts of Journal of the back with photographs. Would the process be able to reveal the treatment given to literature as opposed to photography? Or would it be able to say something about the expectations and ideals projected in each means of communication? When discussing the project with Ernaux, the curator was impressed by the description she made regarding the synergy between photography and writing: “When I write, I try to convey, as far as possible, the weight of reality. Reality grabs us, we are, somewhere, almost prisoners. Let words be like photographs by which we are dominated, fascinated. It is the fascination of reality”. If literature is a way of creating marks, photography does the same thanks to the sense of evidence, of recording, of remembrance, in a process that confers dignity and a certain immortality to the subjects addressed.
Having established that the central point of the project would be to approach excerpts from the diary as photographs, the curator initially focused on the books available in the MEP library and, among these, gave priority to the issue of street photography developed in France in a period ranging from Eugène Atget to Sabine Weiss. After contacting Ernaux, she realized the limits of the project and realized that she was looking for “an ethic”, that is, a way of looking and seeing.
Based on the writer’s observations, he decided to dissociate the project from a defined geographical location in order to adhere to the “feeling of distance, strangeness and separation” that characterized the diary. In the books in the MEP library, Stoppard discovered series of photographs by Daido Moryiama, Mohamed Bourouissa, Lou Stoumen, Harvey Benge, Yosuke Yagima, Derk Zijlher and Felipe Abreu, which seemed to clarify Ernaux’s text and which, reciprocally, seemed to be able to be illuminated by it.
Although the aim of the project was not to illustrate Ernaux’s texts with images, there are nevertheless moments of “visual coincidence” due to some common themes such as stations, supermarkets, customers. To achieve his purpose, Stoppard focuses on the search for “a shared intention, a similar spirit or dynamism”. The synergy sought concerned not only the themes, but also an ethic: “the inaccessibility” described by Annie Ernaux. In other words, the “feeling of a suspension of moral judgment, of a simultaneous acceptance of the way things are and a curiosity about them. An attention directed to reality and a desire to say: here is what it was, here is what it is”.
Finally, the curator decides to use the MEP collection as the basis for the project, setting the time limits for the years 1940 and 2000 and selecting works produced in France, England, Japan and the United States, among others. In some sets of images, she discovers a profound synergy with the writing of Annie Ernaux. This is the case of the series “Accidents” (undated), by Henry Wessel, who shares with the author the questioning of the limits and demands of a narrative and the interest in the seemingly random fragments of life. This is also the case of Bernard Pierre Wolff, who shares with Annie Ernaux an interest in characters neglected or ignored by society.
Based on these assumptions, Stoppard develops the exhibition project Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography, guided by the idea of analyzing her work “beyond the context of literature” and placing it in the universe of photography, in which questions of “proximity, reality, physicality, evidence […] are already central”. In the final design, the curator maintains 1940 as the starting date, but advances to 2021, favoring images taken in the United States, Japan, England and Italy. While some of the selected works deal with “a broad sense of distance or a fractured identity”, others address everyday life: life rituals, advertising language, commerce, etc.
Recalling what Simon Baker saw in Moriyama’s images – “a resolute commitment to the everyday,” the capture of the world “as it is” – Stoppard affirms his relationship with this type of research, underlining his interest in photographs that give weight to things that might otherwise be ignored or forgotten. Annie Ernaux acts in the same way when she states that she wants to put an end to the erasure of things due to the passage of time. This is not a nostalgic feeling, but rather “an attention to life, to the preciousness and precariousness of the moment.”
In the essay produced for the exhibition, the curator establishes links between Ernaux’s text and some of the selected images. The distance located in the diary is echoed in the shots of European cities taken by Jean-Christophe Béchet. The violence hidden by the surface of urban life is paradigmatically illustrated by the fishmonger brandishing a knife, captured by Richard Kalvar. The casual nature of encounters with strangers is represented by the photograph of four people in the Luxembourg Gardens, by Marie-Paule Nègre. The performances of class and status can be observed in the images of Janine Niepce and Wolff. The moments of strangeness can be grouped together in the aforementioned series “Accidents”. The omnipresence of mass media is summed up in a television image of the Gulf War captured by Barbara Alper.
At times the assonances are derived from biographical coincidences or similar views on the creative act. Issei Suda, who recorded in Lifespan new (2002) his love affair with an unnamed woman, is associated with the Ernaultian narrative of Simple passion (1991)[4]. But its presence in the exhibition is determined by the similarity between the idea that in everyday places any kind of story can happen, that “great literature” can be born (the “Fushikaden” series) and what Annie Ernaux wrote in The event (2000)[5]: every experience deserves to be narrated. This same idea explains Garry Winogrand's choice of images, for whom anything is worthy of being photographed.
One of the images presented in the exhibition and reproduced in the catalogue – Social housing in Vitry. Mother and son (1965), by Niepce – prompts Ernaux to reflect on motherhood. The young woman looking out the window gives her the impression of a life confined within four walls. The thumb that the boy places in his mother’s mouth is interpreted by her as a way of preventing him from speaking. This kind of dissociation between mother and son leads her to state: “She, she looks away. Inside there is extreme violence, extreme cruelty, and at the same time, great sweetness. I saw myself again.”
When reporting a comment by the writer on the same image, Stoppard emphasizes the separation between the two figures: the boy looks at his mother, but she looks at the world. This leads her to conclude: “For me, your comment illustrates perfectly what I try to do with this exhibition: to establish parallels between different ways of observing and encountering reality.”
In truth, Janine Niepce's photograph functions as a screen onto which Ernaux projects her own uneasiness with her maternal role, of which she had offered an unretouched portrait in la femme gelee (1981). Accustomed to a life of study and unprepared for domestic chores, the protagonist of this autobiographical novel witnesses the collapse of the ideal of a marriage with equal partners when she finds herself forced to assume the traditional role of housewife. The situation becomes more distressing with the birth of her first child, which increasingly confines her to a role she did not expect to have to play, causing a deep feeling of imprisonment.
The novel ends with the announcement of her second pregnancy, which leads the narrator to project images of what awaits her: “The joys of early childhood, the walks with the stroller on one side and Bicou on the other. Goodbye to the teaching internships, the union, the snowy peaks that later give him the color of a playboy during the winter. Endless Sundays with two children to look after, instead of one. […] Needless to say, I knew very well that, in nine months, I would be alone, struggling with powdered milk and sterilizations, the fun of yesterday is over, when he played daddy-bottle, youth, now there is no more dodging roles, how could he, he works all day, etc. […] Enjoying, for as long as possible, the last moments with just one child. My whole story as a woman is that of a staircase that goes down with a sigh.”
Due to the variety of images, Stoppard begins to group them into themes: public space as a stage where people display themselves and judge themselves; going from the interior to the exterior; commuting and doing things; shopping and various moments of leisure. Alongside this, he thinks about the representation of a day in a city: “the anonymity of the people on the train, the sense of possibility in the stations, the visual assault of the shops, the advertisements and the merchandise, the irresistible visual appeal of it all – particularly the crowd, filled with the vulgarity and beauty of others and full of sensations that disappear almost instantly, as soon as you leave”.
The selection of forty-two scenes from the diary and one hundred and fifty images from twenty-nine photographers is, finally, organized into five axes: “Interior/Exterior”, “Confrontations”, “Crossings”, “Meeting places” and “Socializing”.
The association between Annie Ernaux’s texts and photographic images results in an intensification of the writing, which acquires “an additional clarity and a truly photographic stillness” when read on panels hanging on the wall, according to Anna-Louise Milne. The author believes that this conjunction adds a space “to the routine of daily commutes, to the unchanging underground corridors with their habitual beggars, to the same parking lot in front of the same supermarket, to the patterns of commuting that narrate our way of living and working, which give Ernaux’s diary its particular corrosiveness.”
In an interview with Siegfried Forster, Stoppard explains why she selected the images of Claude Dityvon[6] and to associate them with the writing “DEMENTIA” found by Ernaux on the wall of the RER covered car park. These photographs bring “a kind of tranquillity”; they are, in some way, “flat and the term 'flat'[7] is often used by Annie to describe her writing. I don't really want the images to feel illustrative. It's more of a ethos, in a way of seeing.
In her text, Annie Ernaux refers to a woman on a stretcher carried by two firefighters, and Dityvon's image is titled After the fire with firefighters in the background. It shows how these moments of drama are 'banal' and 'normal' in everyday life, the fights, the moments of violence... Annie has a similar way of writing about things that could be dramatic, but without sensationalism. There is always this kind of clarity and calm.”
More than a photograph, the passage commented by Stoppard makes one think of a film sequence. Annie Ernaux, in fact, describes a very lively scene that takes place on a cold afternoon: a woman on a stretcher carried by two firefighters crosses the square “like a queen in the midst of people who were going to shop at Franprix”; children play near the fire engine in the parking lot; a voice coming from a building shouts a name; the boy in charge of collecting the supermarket trolleys, “with a terrible look in his eyes”, is leaning against the wall of the passage that leads from the parking lot to the square. He is wearing a blue blazer and the same gray pants that fall over large shoes.
What serves as a link between the diary excerpts and the selected images is Ernaux's interest in contemporary society and, in particular, in the urban environment and its peculiarities (social violence, class stereotypes, inequalities), with trains, stations, corridors, escalators, supermarkets, sidewalks as backdrop. Significantly, the visual path of the catalogue, which began with the three images by Dityvon, continues with street scenes (Dolorès Marat, Daido Moriyama, Garry Winogrand, Luigi Ghirri, Mika Ninagawa, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Bernard Pierre Wolff, Yingguang Guo), with shots of escalators (Marat, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg), shopping malls (Kheng-Li Wee), means of transport (Hiro, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Johan van der Keuken), moments of leisure (Marie-Paule Nègre, Tony Ray-Jones, Issei Suda), not always fortuitous snapshots (Henry Wessel, Mohamed Bourouissa, Moriyama, Jean-Christophe Béchet, Harry Callahan, Ninagawa, Wolff), moments of violence (Marguerite Bornhauser), interiors of cafés/restaurants (William Klein, Winogrand, Janine Niepce), with television images (Klein, Barbara Alper), with views of markets and supermarkets (Clarisse Hahn, Charbonnier, Richard Kalvar) and shops (Niepce, van der Keuken), with some portraits (Martine Franck, Suda, Niepce, Ibei Kimura), ending with a somber image of the surroundings of East Railway Station, made by van der Keuken in 1958.
The catalogue is not structured along the lines of the exhibition. It is organized as a continuous flow of texts and images, leaving the reader with the task of establishing connections and/or associations between the written and the visual. In the exhibition, Hiro's large photograph, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, Japan (1962), was associated, on the wall opposite, with a statement by historian Jacques Le Goff – “The metro disorientates me” –, followed by a comment by Ernaux: “Would people who take it every day feel disoriented going to the Collège de France? It is not possible to know”.
The impressive image of an overcrowded train, with passengers crammed against the doors, giving the impression of a unique aquarium, accompanies the description in the catalogue of a twenty- or twenty-five-year-old boy concentrating on trimming his fingernails with a pair of pliers. The passengers pretend not to see the “insolently happy” boy, who admires the “beauty produced” on each finger. Ernaux concludes: “No one can do anything against his ill-mannered happiness – as the air of the people around him indicates”.
In the exhibition, this photograph, full of people in uncomfortable situations, established a dialectical dialogue with two images by Callahan from the series “French Archives” (1957–1958), set in Aix-en-Provence and characterized by powerful contrasts of light and shadow, from which a sense of stillness emanated. The confrontation between such different records is seen by Anna-Louise Milne as a strategy that sheds light on the uncanny quality of Ernaux’s diary, at once close to and distant from ordinary life.
In the catalogue, this sensation of a vigorous contrast is lost not only due to the distance between the images, but, above all, due to the verbal context in which Callahan's photos are inserted: a supermarket snapshot, in which the writer notices the replacement of the trolley collector with a new coin-operated model and the insouciance of two cashiers who gossip about a colleague, without worrying about the customers.
Judging by Milne's description, one of the exhibition rooms had a problematic aspect, as it grouped together two photographs by Mohamed Bourouissa and one by Marguerite Bornhauser – the stalemate (2007), in which four boys are captured in a degraded environment near a burned-out car, and The prison (2008), which shows a young man sitting on the floor, handcuffed and bare-chested, looking at a girl wearing a long t-shirt; Untitled (2015), which records the impact of a bullet on a window near the Bataclan concert hall – and some excerpts from Ernaux relating to violence.
If the inscriptions “Only the ass” and “There are no sub-men”, seen on a wall, could relativize the issue of prejudice, the reference to an underground parking lot, in which the noise of the exhaust fans would not allow one to hear “the screams in a case of rape”, associated with the two images by Bourouissa and the record by Bornhausen, gives the impression of a naturalization of violence, attributed exclusively to the less favored groups in society.
In fact, Bourouissa’s photographs are part of the series “Periphery” (2005-2008), whose title alludes to the Paris ring road that separates the city center from the suburbs. Composed of posed scenes, full of dramatic tension, inspired by the paintings of Caravaggio, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix and the photography of Jeff Wall and Philip-Lorca di Corcia, the series aims to subvert conventional images of the periphery through “consciously structured recompositions of mass media clichés,” in order to inscribe “the recent history of the suburbs” in the history of Western art, as Nikola Lorenzin points out. Bornhauser’s image, in turn, recalls the night of November 13, 2015, when eight attacks were carried out near the Stade de France (Saint Denis), in open-air cafes and in the concert hall by Islamic militants resulted in one hundred and thirty deaths.[8]
Milne defines these images as “scenes of an entirely contemporary violence,” which attest to the failure of social mobility, dear to Annie Ernaux’s generation, and of the fetish forms of modern life such as the automobile, without realizing the prejudicial effect created by these juxtapositions. In the catalogue, this problematic effect, which Stoppard and Ernaux did not realize in the exhibition, is mitigated by the association between the underground scene (preceded by the sight of the crushed cat, “as if inscribed in the asphalt”) with four images from Wessel’s “Incidents” series (undated), and by the assonance created between the two inscriptions recorded in the diary and the stalemate.
Bornhauser's snapshot takes on a new meaning when confronted with the concise record of a phrase that catches the writer's attention in a text read by a student at the RER: “Truth is linked to reality”.
At various times, when browsing the catalogue, one gets the impression that Stoppard was not always happy with her associations and that the selected images could have been replaced by others, without substantial changes in the result. As much as she talks about ethos and in strangeness, it is difficult, at times, to understand the proposed approaches, which do not work either through assonance or dissonance. An additional challenge awaits the reader of the catalogue: the text/image relationship does not follow a determined pattern, and there may be three or more photographs before excerpts from the diary, or vice-versa, creating ambiguous or even incomprehensible situations due to the opacity of the choices.
Examples of free assonances can be detected in the scene of the grandmother and grandson on the train, recorded by Ernaux, and in one of Marat's photographs, Snow in Paris (1997), which depicts the indistinct silhouettes of a woman and a child; in the shot Revolt Square (2005), by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, which captures three women on an escalator, and in the annotation about the book in which each page begins with the question “What time is it?” which leads a girl on the train to a crying fit and a violent reaction; in the vision of the man who displayed his genitals in a deserted subway corridor, which the writer considers an “unbearable gesture to see”, a “poignant form of dignity: exposing that he is a man”, followed by some female images displayed on a street in Pisa and captured by Béchet (2000).
Other examples of assonances can be found in the encounter between the phrases written on a wall at the University of Nanterre – “Enjoy without restrictions / Free sexuality / Free love / Student, you sleep, you lose your life / Let's impose economic equality” – and the photograph Blackpool (1968), by Ray-Jones, in which we see a gigantic representation of a couple dancing and a couple passing by on the street; in the scene of the beggar asking for alms in the RER carriage, which raises in Annie Ernaux the idea that he does not denounce, but comforts society, playing the role of the buffoon who places “an artistic distance between the social reality, misery, alcoholism, to which he refers with his person, and the traveling public.
A role he plays instinctively with immense talent”, preceded by New York City (1984), by Wolff, marked by the contrast between the elderly man with a cane and the “Men working” poster, and followed by another image by Wolff depicting a couple of drug addicts kissing on 14th Street (1975).
There are also examples of critical dissonances between the texts and the content of the images. This is the case of a bitter and melancholic note about a man who tells his dog to go home, making him feel guilty, followed by a statement: “The age-old phrase for children, women and dogs”, which is reflected in the image of the girl wearing a tight raincoat, indifferent to what is happening around her, captured by Charbonnier in 1977.
This is also the case of the scene recorded at the Hédiard store, where the entrance of a black woman in a tunic is followed with concern by the manager, who is confronted with a funny shot of Charbonnier in a supermarket: a man looking to the side, with one arm on his waist, while with the other he holds a trolley and a woman's bag, thinking "Where did she go?" (1973). And also the snapshot of the girl on the RER, who unwraps her purchases to admire and touch them, arousing in the writer the image of "the happiness of owning something beautiful", of "the desire for beauty fulfilled. Such a moving connection with things", preceded by Niepce's photograph of a woman doing her Christmas shopping in the luxurious Dior store (1957).
One dissonance not explored in the catalogue is that between the televised address by the President of the Republic [François Mitterand] using the term “petites gens” [small fry] to designate a large part of the French population, provoking just indignation in Ernaux, and the photograph of the broadcast of the final of the Miss France contest taken by Klein directly from a TV screen (2001). The friction between the gravity of the president’s speech, which defined an entire category of citizens as “inferior”, and the frivolity of the event captured by the camera lens could generate a short circuit that would produce a high degree of estrangement between the two records.
Another dissonance, of an ironic nature, could have arisen from the contrast between the president's prejudiced speech and the television image captured by Alper during the Gulf War that bore the words "During a crisis, television can effectively encourage stability in a society" (1991). Stoppard also did not properly explore in the catalogue the image of a ready made created by a succinct note by the writer: “A cart knocked over on the grass, far from the shopping center, like a forgotten toy.” This deeply photographic image finds no correspondence in the set of images that make up the publication, unless one does not consider as such the aforementioned shot by Alper that has an airplane as its epicenter. However, three more texts are interposed between the ready made verbal and the ready made visual, making possible approximation difficult.
Reading Annie Ernaux’s diary shows that the curator has missed some passages that have a distinctly photographic visual aspect. This is the case of a note from 1986 that refers to the new French realism of the 1960s, particularly Arman’s accumulations. The writer describes a vacant lot, filled with all sorts of debris – packaging, bottles, a magazine, an iron pipe – in which she detects “signs of accumulated presences, of successive solitudes”.
What most draws his attention is the “metamorphosis of all these objects, broken, crushed, intentionally flattened by the people who left them and by the elements. Adding two wears and tear.” Another note with the quality of a snapshot was left out by Stoppard: the girl seen in profile on the subway, chewing gum “with a ferocious speed, without pause,” which could provoke in a man the fantasy that she would be capable of performing a violent gesture of a sexual nature. The vision of the future of the hypermarket could also have been selected, as it is full of references to a new visual regime.
When asked whether the information about the origin of April 1st broadcast over loudspeakers was intended to “attenuate advertising insistence”, Ernaux imagines the future of the hypermarket: full of cinematic screens and animations about painting and literature and offering computer courses, which would transform it into a “space peep show".
The note regarding the erasure of the letters “dé” at the station House of Representatives, which turned the deputies into “whores”, could have been equally selected for its flagrant aspect and associated with some shots of Brassaï belonging to the collection of European House of Photography, who were not part of Stoppard's selection.
The encounter between the account of erasure and the images of torn posters (1958-1960) – which bring to mind other works of new realism, such as the “palimpsests” of François Dufrêne, Raymond Haines, Jacques de Villeglé and the décollages by Mimmo Rotella, initiated in Rome in 1954 – would have made Ernaux's text even more acute, which speaks of a “sign of anti-parliamentarism” that foreshadows fascism, but which, at the same time, asks whether the person who erased the letters did not simply want to have fun and amuse others: “Is it possible to dissociate the present and individual meaning of an act from its future, possible meaning, from its consequences?”
The description of the lingerie store and the sensations it evokes (beauty, fragility, lightness) did not catch the curator’s attention, despite its implicit visual content. Ernaux does not limit herself to externalizing the meaning of contact with such beauty, as legitimate as the desire to “breathe fresh air,” but goes further, giving free rein to the erotic imagination that makes her envision men wearing silk lingerie “to give us the pleasure of the sweetness and fragility discovered and touched in their bodies.”
This is not the only moment in which the writer gives in to the pleasure of consumption. This had already been done in previous notes, which were devoid, however, of the subtle erotic charge of the 1991 record. The first focused on the desire to possess some piece of clothing different from those she already had, but not necessary; the second, on the sensation of being in the middle of “an attack of colors, of shapes” and of being “torn apart by these living, countless things that we can put on ourselves”. As in the first case, leaving the department store and coming into contact with the “damp and black” floor of Boulevard Haussmann bring her back to reason: she didn’t need a sweater, or a dress, or anything.
If Stoppard was so aware of the effects of consumption, as she writes in the catalogue essay, why did she leave out these notes in which Ernaux blends in with the multitude of anonymous people who populate the pages of the diary, recognizing herself as having the same drive to acquire beautiful and ultimately useless things? Her image would not be tarnished, but, on the contrary, would gain a dimension closer to the desires and ambitions of a human being like any other. She herself had immersed herself in ordinary life, when she writes in an excerpt selected for the exhibition that she was “crossed by people, by her existence as a whore.”
This 1988 reflection had been preceded, two years earlier, by an explanation of the reasons that led her to describe scenes she saw in everyday life: “What do I really seek, with such zeal? The meaning? Often, but not always, out of an intellectual habit (acquired) of not giving in only to sensation […]. Or, writing down the gestures, attitudes, and words of the people I meet gives me the illusion of being close to them. I don’t talk to them, I just look at them and listen to what they say. But the emotion they leave in me is a real thing. It’s possible that I seek something about myself through them, their ways of holding themselves, their conversations (Often, ‘why am I not that woman?’ sitting in front of me on the subway, etc.).”
This movement of solidarity, this recognition of oneself in the other, dissipates when Ernaux comes across the New City, which remains unknown even after twelve years. There is little she can do in the face of its inhospitable appearance, other than to note down the places she has been to shop, the journeys she has made along the highway, the color of the sky… “No descriptions,” she concludes, “and no accounts either. Just moments, encounters. An ethnotext.” Stoppard was undoubtedly captivated by this ethnographic quality of Annie Ernaux’s writing, which scrutinizes the surrounding environment to paint a portrait of contemporary society and to speak of herself through others.
If it is true, as some say, that every photograph is a self-portrait, Ernaux creates a multifaceted self-portrait in her unique diary, driven by the belief that looking at the outside cannot help but bring to the surface deep-rooted and sometimes dormant feelings. This fine-tuning between the outside and the inside can be perceived at the moment when the writer recognizes that she is part of “popular culture” when she hears words “passed down from generation to generation, absent from newspapers and books, ignored by schools.”
And also in the reflection on the dichotomous relationship that can be established with the place of origin, once again evoked from words that are rarely used in contemporary times. It is possible to think that they disappeared along with the misery to which they were linked. Or to imagine oneself returning to a city left behind a long time ago and finding people identical to what they were in the past. In both cases, it is a question of a lack of knowledge of reality and a conception of the self as a single measure: “in the first, identification of all others with oneself, in the second, a desire to reappropriate the self of yesteryear in beings detained forever in their last image, at the moment in which we leave the city”.
As the diary attests, Annie Ernaux escaped this trap thanks to an attentive and empathetic view of the reality around her, from which she captured tics, fleeting gestures, interactions, and aspirations, without setting herself up as a judge or moral conscience. The photographs selected by Stoppard follow this same pattern: they present multiple visions of a humanity that appears to have the same habits and behaviors, regardless of their place of origin, since they seem to be part of a collective unconscious underlying the most diverse social configurations.
The curator managed to capture this common substrate, but, at least in the catalogue, she was unable to establish the necessary connections, leaving many images adrift and raising a general question: why did she not include in her selection works by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ralph Gibson, Larry Clark, Martin Parr, among others, since they are part of the collection of the European House of Photography?
In any case, despite the reservations, the operation carried out by Stoppard managed to underline the photographic character of Ernault's writing, based on the belief that the act of seeing is not a mere gliding over the surface of things. It is, on the contrary, a way of reflecting, of interpreting, of becoming aware of what is happening around us and, why not, of being surprised by the variety of phenomena offered by the apparent banality of everyday life.
Just like photographers attentive to the spectacle of everyday life, the writer demonstrates the ability to deal with aspects of mass civilization in a detached but no less critical manner, creating snapshots of general situations or firing flashes on signs that could go unnoticed if they were not made visible by the interest they aroused in her.
* Annateresa Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Visual Arts at ECA-USP. She is the author, among other books, of Reality and fiction in Latin American photography (UFRGS Publisher).
Reference
STOPPARD, Lou. (org.). Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and photography. London: Mackbooks/MEP, 2024, sp [https://amzn.to/4gS3LD9]
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FABRIS, Annateresa; FABRIS, Mariarosaria. “Realism: two confluent visions”. In: FABRIS, Annateresa; KERN, Maria Lúcia Bastos (org.). Image and knowledge🇧🇷 São Paulo: Edusp, 2006.
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Notes
[1]Through the father's life story, the author focuses on family and class relations, in a stripped-down narrative in which personal memory is mixed with sociological observation.
[2] Ernaux refers to the science fiction film Alphaville, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, which premiered in 1965. In a period after the 1960s, detective Lemmy Caution is sent to Alphaville, a dystopian and totalitarian city, light years away from Earth. The city is dominated by a supercomputer and its main characteristic is the banishment of all feelings. Caution defeats the supercomputer by proposing a riddle (which probably involves the word love) and leaves Alphaville in the company of Natacha von Braun, whom he had won over by talking to her about the “outside world” and feelings and reciting Paul Éluard’s poem, Capital of the douleur.
[3] On the subject, see: Fabris & Fabris, 2006.
[4] With surgical precision, the author narrates the overwhelming passion for a married man, with whom she had a relationship after her divorce. In her autobiographical book, Ernaux shows how she lived the experience of the limit, replacing reason with “magical thinking” and leaving aside chronological time in favor of the presence and absence of her lover.
[5] In a concise and detached manner, Ernaux recalls the journey undertaken in 1963 to perform a clandestine abortion, reflecting on the violence exerted by society on the female body.
[6] The catalogue reproduces three photographs of Dityvon associated with the initial section of Ernaux's diary: After the fire, Les Olympiades, Paris 13o (1979) Rue du Départ, shopping center, Montparnasse tower (1979) and 18pm, Bercy Bridge, Paris (1979). The last one represents two women at a bus stop.
[7] Ernaux defines flat writing as “writing of observation, diligently devoid of value judgment, writing as close as possible to reality, deprived of affections”. In Brazil, as the translation of The place, the term “neutral” was used, but it does not fully meet the author’s objectives.
[8] It is interesting to note that the reason for the impact of the bullets on the windows was also recorded by other professionals such as Steven Wassenaar and Hans Lucas, from Agence France Press, who captured this effect at the Le Carillon café.
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