Lou Stoppard, Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, 2024

Committing the movements, postures and words of the people I meet to paper gives me the illusion of being close to them. I do not talk to them, I just watch and listen to them. Yet the emotions they arouse in me are real. Perhaps I am also 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

Outsiders: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writings of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with photographs from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie collection by photographers such as Harry Callahan, Claude Dityvon, Dolorès Marat, Daidō Moriyama, Janine Niépce, Issei Suda, Henry Wessel and Bernard Pierre Wolff.

Inspired by Ernaux’s unique artistic attempt to “describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I have encountered”, this project by writer and curator Lou Stoppard uncovers the profound ways in which the written and visual image can inform and influence each other. In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography and the ways in which common themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes and individual identity in the modern urban environment – can be explored between these two forms.