Tag: Peter Watkins

Arles 2025: staging radicality within safe limits?

Is the art world willing to take real political risks, or does it perform radicality within safe limits? What to make of aesthetic gestures of dissent without institutional accountability and without any attempts at broader movement building? Peter Watkins probes these questions and more in the context of Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025, arguing that a familiar absence remains despite this year’s theme of ‘disobedient’ images. Elsewhere, festival highlights include Nan Goldin’s recurring interventions, intergenerational collaboration between Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, a guerilla poster campaign by NO-PHOTO, and the deeply personal work of Diana Markosian.

Peter Watkins | Festival report | 24 July 2025
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The notion that images and their makers can be ‘disobedient’ implies that they hold the power to disrupt, to rebel and to resist the status quo. It suggests that they might serve as an outlet towards a more progressive politics – a means of confronting and reflecting on the systems of power that shape both cultural and political life, and a means to propose critical and aesthetic alternatives in response to the world around us.

In this moment of collective urgency, when the systems that govern us are becoming increasingly repressive and authoritarian, the idea of disobedience takes on an increased importance and risk. The current climate in Europe and the United States is marked by the widespread institutional cancellations of artists, slashing of cultural budgets, silencing of academics and student protests, increased state violence, and the suppression of free and open political and creative expression. Against the rise of “nationalism, nihilism and environmental crises,” as the festival put it in their opening gambit, we might do well to ask how seriously Les Rencontres d’Arles takes the artistic and political freedoms of those presented in this year’s edition, and address what has been left unsaid in the process. 

In a statement issued during the 2022 edition, Les Rencontres d’Arles declared its unilateral support for the Ukrainian people in their “fight for freedom,” dedicating the opening week to honouring the “artists and photographers whose lives are threatened by Russia’s aggression.” Fast forward three years, and while the war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s edition includes neither mention nor representation of Ukrainian artists, institutions or direct geopolitical issues related to the region.

While this year is marked by the inclusion of historically marginalised communities, issues surrounding colonial legacies and is notable for its work of inclusion and politics of representation, there remains a colossal elephant in the room. For a festival – and an industry – that has spent years championing diversity, flirting with decolonial discourse and sexual politics, the absence of any tangible mention of the political realities we find ourselves in the present is both deeply disappointing and troubling.

It was left to Nan Goldin, once again – leveraging her considerable artistic and cultural influence – to say what the festival would not. To kick off proceedings, her film Memory Lost (2019-21), underscored by answering machine recordings, seminal photographs of her and her friends, and revolving around abuse, friendship, love, deprivation, and loss, was accompanied by a live piano performance by Eliza McCarthy. It played out to the vast imposing Théâtre Romain, which was full to the brim with approximately 2500 people, comprising those from every corner of  the photography community. Goldin was presented with the Women in Motion award, which she accepted graciously, joking that Les Rencontres had shown bravery in honouring her at such a politically charged moment, and promised the audience a surprise at the end.

In the conversation that followed, she chose to speak out against the growing repression of trans and LGBTQIA+ communities, particularly in the context of increasingly draconian policies in the United States that have eroded decades of progress in terms of policy and rights. This was accompanied by a slideshow depicting her early photographs of drag queens, starting out with a portrait of David Armstrong depicted here as a young man dressed as a woman. “He wasn’t a queen himself,” she reflected, “he was just so androgynous and beautiful that men would divorce their wives when they saw him.”

As the moon shone brightly in the night sky, a spotlit Nan Goldin told the audience that “we need silence now.” The word Gaza appeared across the screen. The film was composed of video clips compiled from social media. It started like this: Children playing, laughing, bustling food markets, panoramas of cosmopolitan life. People congregating, families on the beach, kids flying kites, a birthday party, a father throwing his child into the air. Then, plumes of smoke, citizens evacuating, explosions, dead bodies, a man shaking uncontrollably with fear, people running, people dying, neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, dead journalists surrounded by living journalists, a man comforting a child. A child holding the head of a dead parent. And the unmistakable look of horror in the eyes of the children. Towards the end we see desperate unarmed Palestinians running for aid. A child no older than eight years old says: “we are tired of this darkness. We are tired of this life.” 

The video was silent, there was no audio, but for the wind catching the giant projection screen. What followed was a powerful speech by Goldin standing alongside writer Edouard Louis who shared the burden. At 71 years old, Goldin struggled at some points to stand, but her voice remained steady and erudite. Some of the audience left in a steady stream, but most stayed, and when one woman heckled passionately screaming about hostages, the palpable tension that had filled the air bubbled over, with Goldin moving off script, and addressing the woman directly, but keeping her cool. Free Palestine chants rang out in solidarity and Goldin completed what she had come to say. When she returned to her seat near to where I was sitting, she said in typical Nan Goldin style: “get me outta here,” to her youthful entourage. 

A wide range of UN bodies, the International Court of Justice, judicial panels, investigation committees as well as most major human rights NGO’s and experts, have characterised Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as Genocide, warning that it meets the criteria as defined by the Genocide Convention. More than 50,000 children have been killed or injured by one of the most sophisticated war machines on the planet. Food and aid is being used as a weapon of war. Genocide is occurring in Gaza, but also in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Congo. Our complicity in the West and in our industry is marked by the silence of our institutions, and the gatekeepers at their helms, prioritising corporate sponsorship above moral clarity. 

Change can only occur through lifting this silence, practicing disobedience and risking something of ourselves in what we believe in. It should not have to fall squarely on the shoulders of Nan Goldin to be the mouthpiece for an industry’s failures. We speak of care, inclusivity, decolonialism and progress, yet this festival has been unable to acknowledge the horrors of the present moment, nor create any tangible platform for them to be discussed. We have a collective duty to do more, and we must do so much more. 

NO-PHOTO, a collective of artists and activists, were notable for their powerful campaign of posters plastered up on walls around Arles. Made up of textual descriptions of photographs from Gaza, the collective called for “cultural institutions to align their visual language with ethical clarity and action.” The power of these political works lies in their conceptual premise: a deliberate refusal to include photography. The image is replaced by a void, a black rectangle, representing a conscious rejection of resharing photographs of Palestinian suffering as tokens to evoke compassion, but rather referring back to the ubiquity of those images through their absence.

An accompanying newsprint featuring an essay from 2023 by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues that genocide cannot be captured in a single image, but must be traced across a body of images and actions over time. It asserts that Israel is a settler colonial regime built on the systematic displacement and elimination of Palestinians, using strategies such as expulsion, incarceration and militarised control, especially in Gaza. She talks about how the normalisation of Palestinian suffering through images frames their lives as disposable. She concludes by stating that we must acknowledge this genocide, our complicity, not only for the sake of the Palestinian cause, but for the sake of humanity, pluralism and justice. 

Carole Newhouse and Carmen Winant’s collaborative exhibition simply titled Double was quietly one of the highlights of the festival. Thoughtful, tender, their collaboration marks an intergenerational feminist alliance which looks to reclaim and amplify feminist strategies from the past and bring them to the present. Through the simple gesture of double-exposure, the two women collaborated on a series of works that were an aesthetic pleasure to behold. The exhibition invites us to consider the transformative potential of a radical reinvention and reclamation of the self. Neatly curated by Nina Strand, it is well executed, intelligent work.

Meanwhile the skyline dominating LUMA presents the work of late photographer David Armstrong, with a retrospective exhibition handled with the utmost care and precision by artist Wade Guyton and curator Matthieu Humery. Two rooms separate black and white and colour, with vast vitrines of contact sheets quietly footnoting the first room. Armstrong’s signature devil-may-care portraits of friends, lovers and fellow artists predominantly from the East Village in New York in the 1970’s through to the 90’s seduce with effortless cool and sexiness. He was a life-long friend of Nan Goldin, photographing people such as Cookie Mueller, Greer Lankton, Mark Morrisroe, and other members of the queer scene. The exhibition is handled beautifully, allowing for a kind of escapism from the visual noise dominating Arles over the opening week. 

Escaping the midday heat of the festival, Batia Suter’s exhibition Octahydra curated by Francesca Marcaccio Hitzeman took us beneath the ancient Forum, into the Cryptoportiques and the bowels of the earth. In the cool, damp air, and dripping wet walls, two powerful projectors face each other from opposite ends of the cavernous corridor, separated by sheer fabric projection screens and smaller intermediary screens that catch fragments of the images as they pass through. Moving between them, the images dissolve and recombine, decontextualising and abstracting the architectural typologies first presented on the main screens. This is very much a bodily and sensory experience, one that demonstrates both restraint and a precise response to the unique nature of the space. Her work, which I had only experienced in book form until now, translates wonderfully into exhibition form – creating a new register of experience. Many photographers and exhibiting artists at the festival could learn from this kind of thoughtful translation. Too often, the visual and material strategies on display relied on a too-similar, now-familiar material language which permeates the photography world as distinct from the contemporary art world, often resulting in a total flattening of affect and experience. I was left wondering just how many of these exhibitions might have taken another, more appropriate form. Just as not every body of work needs to become a book, not every body of work should become an exhibition.

A notable mention goes to Keisha Scarville, whose work predominantly comprises self-portraiture, reappropriating and embodying the clothing and fabrics left behind by her late mother. We are told that she takes inspiration from Egúngún, also known as Ará Ọ̀run (‘The collective dead’), a masked or costumed figure, of the Yoruba people. Her work is playful, graphic, and working through the processes of grief and absence that so often permeate the material remains of the departed, but with the kind of energy that also takes the work outside of that register. She approximates the absence of the mother, through the positioning of herself in the frame, inhabiting the clothing of her mother, and moving between classical and more experimental forms. A pleasurably graphic mode of self-presentation and exploration.

Meanwhile, Brandon Gercara’s exhibition draws on the volcanic landscape of La Réunion – specifically the Piton de la Fournaise – to forge a poetic and political language of resistance. Inspired by the geological formation of hyaloclastites, their art crystallises new, sustainable spaces for marginalised communities, particularly through the lens of Kwir identity, a Creole reimagining of ‘queer.’ In the films Playback de la pensée Kwir and Conversations and Lip sync de la pensée, Gercara uses drag to transmute personal and collective trauma into spectral, extraterrestrial figures that defy normative social structures. Their practice weaves together activism and art to expose and destabilise the lingering forces of colonialism – gender, racial and class-based oppression – suggesting an emancipatory territory rooted in intersectionality and resistance.

Finally, the talk of the town was undoubtedly Diana Markosian’s exhibition, tucked away upstairs in the Monoprix supermarket near the railway station. Markosian was just seven when her mother took her and her brother from Moscow to the United States in 1996, leaving their father behind without saying goodbye. He returned to an empty apartment and spent years searching for his missing children, desperately writing letters to authorities and strangers alike. In California, their mother cut him from family photographs, erasing his presence entirely. Markosian revisited this deeply personal history in her 2020 monograph Santa Barbara, which reconstructs their migration and her mother’s determination to start a new life. Fifteen years later, she travelled to Armenia in search of her father, an emotional reunion that became the foundation for Father, a project weaving together photography, archival documents and video to explore absence, reconciliation and the painful legacy of their estrangement. 

Markosian draws on every tool at her disposal to elicit an emotional response – at times, perhaps too insistently, as with the piano soundtrack that borders on instructive. But the music urges us to experience the work cinematically, inviting us to be swept up in the narrative and given space to dream. This cinematic quality makes the reunion feel as if it is both happening and not happening. On the day I saw it, like many others, I wept – moved by the simplicity of a black-and-white photograph of her father’s shirt, hanging in plastic after being laundered – perhaps reminded of my own photograph of my mother’s dress. There is a moment in the film where Markosian sits across from her father, and they briefly hold hands while staring into each other’s eyes. There is a flicker of pain and relief and love and awkwardness in the eyes of her father in this moment, and this felt direct, poignant and universal. This moment had me totally floored. 

When art and culture is at its very best it doesn’t rest on its laurels; it provokes us, it unsettles us, it carves out the space for renewal and reimagining, and it provides us with forms of collective empathy. Despite eternal precarity, art carries with it these responsibilities: to keep asking difficult questions, to do the hard work in the good times and the bad, and to offer a safe environment outside of the banalities and disappointments of everyday lived experience. 

That two of the most powerful moments at this year’s festival came not from the official programming – Nan Goldin after the award ceremony, and NO-PHOTO on the fringes – but from artists turning their work back onto the institution and the industry itself, is telling. It reveals the limits of representation without accountability, and of inclusion without political engagement. And yet, these moments also point towards a very different possibility – one where festivals like Les Rencontres d’Arles not only platform voices but also respond to the urgencies those voices name. A transformed festival would not just celebrate disobedience as a theme, but give more space to it as a practice: by refusing neutrality in the face of violence and divesting from oppressive structures, all the while creating meaningful space for dissent, dialogue and action.♦

Les Rencontres d’Arles runs until 5 October 2025.

—
Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Nan Goldin. Young Love, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

2&3-NO-PHOTO 2025 poster campaign. Courtesy Double Dummy.

4-Carol Newhouse. Self-portrait made during an Art and Photography workshop, WomanShare, Summer 1975. Courtesy the artist.

5-Carol Newhouse and Carmen Winant, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

6-David Armstrong, Cookie at Bleecker St., NYC, 1977. Courtesy the estate of David Armstrong.

7-David Armstrong, George in the Water, Provincetown, 1977. Courtesy the estate of David Armstrong.

8&9-Installation views of David Armstrong, 2025, LUMA Arles. Courtesy the estate of David Armstrong. © Victor&Simon – Grégoire D’Ablon

10&11-Batia Suter, excerpt from Octahydra, video, 2024. Out of the Metropolis project, NŌUA, Bodø. Courtesy the artist.

12&13-Installation views of Batia Suter: Octahydra, 2025. Courtesy Out of the Metropolis.

14-Keisha Scarville, Untitled #18, Alma / Mama’s Clothes series, 2017. Courtesy the artist.

15-Brandon Gercara. Joseph 83; from the Conversations series, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

16-Diana Markosian, The Cut Out; from the Father series, 2014-24. Courtesy the artist.

17-Diana Markosian, Mornings with You; from the Father series, 2014-24. Courtesy the artist.

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Decay in America

A time-warped book-object of dust, detritus and déjà vu, Christian Patterson’s GONG CO., published by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey, with a recent exhibition at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin, stages the slow decay of a family-run grocery store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Weaving the personal into a broader reflection on how images collapse time and space, Peter Watkins approaches it as a work that mourns and animates the past simultaneously: a meditation on surface, obsolescence, corporate homogeneity’s erosion of the singular and the distant engagement with a mythologised idea of ‘America’ from afar.

Peter Watkins | Exhibition/photobook review | 22 May 2025

For weeks, Christian Patterson’s weighty new book, GONG CO., lay unopened on my desk, its cellophane sleeve untouched, waiting for a moment that felt right. His previous two books – Redheaded Peckerwood (2011) and Bottom of the Lake (2015) – became immediate hits, during a period of peculiarly energetic and experimental book publishing within photography. While presenting his books to students recently I was reminded that, despite my best intentions, I still haven’t called the associated telephone numbers linked to his appropriated telephone book Bottom of the Lake – numbers which provide a portal to the artist’s hometown, and consist of archival sound, field recordings and performances. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’m taking my time here too.

Removing the book from its brown kraft paper dust jacket, its weathered green, clothbound cover and stained page edges provoke an attention to materiality and to surfaces. This book-cum-object felt strangely reminiscent of a forged tax ledger once fabricated by my teenage employer in the polytunnel of our local garden centre – the book of fictional numbers, nestled roughly in amongst soily platforms of hardy plants, was given the occasional watering and blasts of sporadic British sunshine before attaining a believable enough patina to be presented to straight-backed tax inspectors. Patterson’s book, too, is about surfaces: stories of Americana wrapped in the packaging of nostalgia, commerce and eventual ruin.

Patterson’s work has always operated at the intersection of fiction and documentary, and GONG CO. is no exception. This body of work, developed over a period of two decades – photographic, graphic and humorously symbolic – points us somehow to the forces of late-stage capitalism; the slow death of small businesses, such as the general store featured here, along with all their idiosyncrasies and sense of otherness. The publisher TBW Books writes: ‘It was like an unintentional time capsule, and an uncanny fulfilment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy that “someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.”’

The book and Patterson’s recent solo exhibition at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin are layered with constructed still lifes, object curiosities and interior views of the shop itself. Text-based works framed neatly in cardboard mix with photographs of aged commercial newsprint, and evidence of shop detritus accumulated over decades. In the exhibition, two seductively large prints feature photographic reproductions of old newspapers covering the shop windows, backlit from the outside world. This play of interiority and exteriority is echoed and expanded upon in the narrative unfolding of the book itself. Standing in front of the work, I overhear Robert Morat explaining the technical process in German to a visitor: this backlighting isn’t just an aesthetic choice but a way for us to begin to understand the wider work itself. I look down, and beneath one of these framed photographs, a dog-eared rat trap hugs the wall: ‘Can’t Miss,’ reads the trap, but the trap has already been sprung. The victim is notably absent.

These works are all surface and seduction – the gleam of impossibly dustless anti-reflective glass, the surgical precision of the walnut frames – somewhat antithetical to the content of the works, but make for deeply satisfying art work commodities in and of themselves. One recurring theatrical motif is hands presenting various objects to the camera, this time a stopped watch, which becomes a synecdoche for time itself: artificial, commodified, always on display. The watch is fixed at 12:54. In another work, a white plastic clock held upside down rests at 12:57. The hands that hold them are dirty, worn – workers’ hands, but maybe more likely those of Patterson himself in a studio reconstruction. These images are symbolic of capitalism’s residues, presumably referencing the hardworking agricultural South of the Mississippi Delta, where this project was born. Or is it spelt ‘Missisippi’, as my scrawled first draft read? My misspelling whilst hurtling back on the train between Berlin and Prague becomes part of what I’m trying to get at. These images point toward a place that is as real as it is imagined. For many of us outside the U.S., America exists as a series of signs – visual referents to a land both omnipresent and unknowable. Patterson’s America is one we recognise not necessarily from personal experience this side of the Atlantic, but from TV reruns, movies and childhood sweet wrappers.

GONG CO. nods toward William Eggleston, not only in those bare light bulb ceiling views, but more so in the works’ deliberate lighting and colour palette. Years ago, Patterson was an assistant of Eggleston, himself based in the South, just north of the border in Memphis, Tennessee, and somehow this influence continues to shine through in a way that makes me remember why I love the lineage that photography affords. One photograph of a clapboard house, boarded up and vacant, reads like a façade within a façade; the lighting is rich, thickly seductive, calling to mind the artificial golden hour glow of Hollywood and those flat faced film set constructions from old western movies. It is what it appears to be – and yet it isn’t. The glass from the house has been removed, and the tight crop means we have no reference to depth, no way to move beyond the building’s surface, no way around it.

This sense of staging is everywhere in the show. An aged yellow plastic racket leans in the corner like a prop or a long-lost attic find. A $2 bill is nailed directly through Thomas Jefferson’s head to the gallery wall, a store-opening ritual to bring good fortune. We’re not watching a play here, but perhaps we’re walking through the set after the final curtain. The presence of text works is notable – signs and product lists that punctuate the project performatively. ‘All Day Every Day.’ ‘Anything and Everything.’ ‘Going Out of Business.’

When we glimpse the interior views of GONG CO., you notice the forlorn shelves house objects that don’t necessarily belong to the same time period – some appear to have sat untouched for decades, others feel startlingly recent. A box of Starburst (once named Opal Fruits in the UK, to those of us who remember), an empty pack of King Edward cigars (the kind my father smoked occasionally, and let me try at too young an age), and I perhaps falsely remember a can of soup, which brings us neatly back to Warhol.

For all its rigour, GONG CO. is not cold. It’s not even really nostalgic, at least not in a tired, sentimental sense. It’s energetic with curiosity, with humorous tactility, and with love for the worn and weathered world of the everyday that might tell us something about our shared lived experience. I’m reminded of my grandmother’s long closed Laden in southern Germany, the drawers full of wrapping paper adorned with old typography and faded quaint commercial mottos, accompanied by the distinctive smell of old furniture. Perhaps there’s a kind of post-nostalgia at work here – less about longing for what can’t be recovered, more about the fascination with what that transition looks like.

After the show, I cycled through the Berlin spring sunshine and passed a building scrawled with graffiti in capital letters: ‘HOW LONG WAS NOW.’ The question felt scripted by Patterson himself. His work, like that phrase, collapses time. It’s not about when a thing happened, but how it reverberates – in texture, in colour, in loose metaphor.

In an era where replication and corporate sameness seem to swallow individuality, GONG CO. is both requiem and resistance. It reminds us that every object carries a history, every sign is part of a larger language, and every photograph – at its best – can and should be a small, still rebellion.♦

Christian Patterson: GONG CO. ran at Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, until 17 May 2025 and is published by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey

—
Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Christian Patterson, All Day Every Day, 2020

2-Christian Patterson, Bottles and Shadows, 2017

3-Christian Patterson, Coca-Cola Wall, 2013

4-Christian Patterson, Grocery List, 2019

5-Christian Patterson, Hand (a Customer Enters), 2019

6-Christian Patterson, Newspaper Window (Red), 2016

7-Christian Patterson, Shelf Still Life (Pickle Jar), 2016

8-Christian Patterson, Store Lot Tile, 2005

9-Christian Patterson, Store View (East), 2019

10-Christian Patterson, Storeroom Door, 2019

11-Christian Patterson, Storeroom Lightbulb, 2019

12-Christian Patterson, The Clock, 2019

13-Christian Patterson, Tin Side (Silver, American Flag), 2013

14-Christian Patterson, Wastebasket, 2017

15-Christian Patterson, Yellow Dog Doors, 2013

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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Seeing through time with Annie Ernaux

Curator and writer Lou Stoppard adds visual repertoire to Annie Ernaux’s iconic Exteriors, originally published in 1993, through a new publication and exhibition titled Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography — co-published by MACK and Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris. Recognising Ernaux’s iconic literary style – unapologetic, brave, and tender, inherently political and dedicated to amplifying marginalised voices – Stoppard sifted through 24,000 photographs, resulting in a photo-book that captures the rituals of everyday life, in a way not so mundane, as Peter Watkins writes.

Peter Watkins | Book review | 21 Mar 2024 

Annie Ernaux’s intimately autobiographical writing is much like the dull ache of an old injury, reminding the body, through its persistence, of its entanglement in the world over time. She writes for the sake of memory and forgetting, and has been prolific in her output since the mid-1970s, earning a Nobel Prize for Literature along the way. Her writing is unapologetic, unembarrassed and tender in its bravery. She has spoken of her work as being inherently political, driven by a genuine desire to give voice to the underrepresented, namely the working class, in acutely observed reflections from her everyday encounters. Her work is paired back, unadorned, with no room for hyperbole. A pioneer of autofiction, she doesn’t seem to suffer from the indulgences and excesses that sometimes accompany the genre. 

Ernaux has spoken of photography as acting as a catalyst for her writing, but it’s ordinary, as opposed to extraordinary, photographs of people that are meaningful to her. She uses photographs as an aide de memoire, and has suggested that: ‘The photograph is nothing other than stopped time. But the photograph does not save. Because it is mute. I believe on the contrary that photography increases the pain of passing time. Writing saves, and cinema.’ In her book The Years (2008), the opening passages come to us like abrupt flashes of memory; fragmentary, and incomplete, but bright and image-like. These lines reveal perhaps most clearly, both her directness and the umbilical bond between photography, memory and language, as well as the existential fear of forgetting and being forgotten: ‘All the images will disappear. […] Everything will be erased in a second. […] We will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.’

Upon reading Exteriors (1996), Lou Stoppard contacted Simon Baker, Director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, surprised that there hadn’t previously been a major institutional collaboration between Ernaux’s writing and photography, particularly given the building attention around her life’s work, not to mention the photographic claims her writing has made, as so explicit in Exteriors. Stoppard was promptly invited to spend a month going through some 24,000 photographs and 36,000 photobooks that make up the MEP’s collection. Her selections represent some of major names in documentary photography such as William Klein, Luighi Ghirri, Ursula Schulz-Dornberg, Claude Dityvon and Daido Moriyama. The photographs were made in the mid-20th century onwards and depict almost always people, built-up environments and ephemeral encounters in the city. 

Post-war photography of this kind moved us away from a prescribed reading of the image to a multi-layered, subjective and ultimately equivocal vision of the world – uncertain images for uncertain times – and, in that sense, the pairings seem apt, if sometimes a little on the nose. Stoppard herself concedes these ‘moments of visual coincidence’ of course occur, a near-impossibility to avoid perhaps, given the familiarity of the imagery evoked in Ernaux’s writing. She also didn’t want to focus on the grand boulevards of Paris, on Eugène Atget, or the traditional idea of the flâneur, but, rather, on a more universal vision of the everyday, the language of advertising and the rituals of life. Indeed, to do otherwise wouldn’t have made sense, given Ernaux’s politics and focus. As Stoppard points out: ‘To compare Ernaux’s writing to photography is a project that is impossible to divorce from questions of class. Seeing is a privilege. Photographing is even more of a privilege.’

The inference of pairing Ernaux’s originally slim 74-page Exteriors with this curated selection of photographs from the MEP’s collection is to cement some of the photographic associations we already hold dear to her work, but perhaps also to examine this lesser-known publication in photographic terms – extending readings, teasing out connections and re-examining the question of how literature and photography can coexist, and to what end. Stoppard makes headway in this regard in her accompanying essay “Writing Images”, found at the end of Exteriors – Annie Ernaux and Photography, jointly published by MACK. Here, she attempts to contextualise Ernaux’s photographic intentions not only by examining Exteriors, but also by reaching back within the wider context of her work. 

Over the decades, Ernaux’s writing has fearlessly examined, amongst others, themes such as the interior life, identity, women and the body, shame, nascent sexuality, illegal abortion, female sexuality, relationships, grief and the perception of time. Unwavering in her pursuit, these themes have played out somewhere between Ernaux’s subjective personal experiences, read within the wider societal and political movements of the times. 

If Ernaux’s work often leans towards the exploration of interiority, a pursuit nearing claustrophobia in its intensity, then Exteriors, in some respects, represents a literal break, turning itself outwards to the surface of things. The book, in its original form, is made up of journal entries written over the course of seven years, between 1985 and 1992, and mostly in-and-around Cergy-Pontoise, one of five suburban “new towns” surrounding Paris built up in the 1960s, a place she has vehemently rejected as being simply categorised as a non-lieux or non-place. This is where she has written much of her work, a place that is integral to her writing, a place she calls home: ‘A place suddenly sprung up from nowhere, a place bereft of memories […] A place with undefined boundaries.’

These are observations from Ernaux’s adopted home, the neighbourhoods she moves through, from the dentist’s waiting room to the RER suburban train or visits to the Hypermarket. These are the banal spaces of the everyday, observed matter-of-factly, sharply. This is a real, visceral vision of the periphery, away from the charm and clichés of Paris. For Ernaux, these everyday spaces are imbued with sociological and psychological substance, with ‘as much meaning and human truth as the concert hall.’

The images serve to punctuate what is about a third of Ernaux’s book, which is broken up chronologically, and slipped formally between the photographs, inevitably encouraging associations through juxtaposition. The text and images evoke one another, but are not intended as captions or illustrations. Rather, they are offered equal weighting on the page. The images weave between eras and geographies, almost all depicting people, or signs of humanity, pointing towards the universal experience of the city, where, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population currently dwells. The photographs, as well as the text, attest to the observational faculties of their authors, captivating and complicating our attention, without ever really being too prescriptive or dogmatic in their associations.

In her interview with the Louisiana Channel, Ernaux describes her work as factual, and restrained of feeling. She writes in Exteriors: ‘I have sought to describe reality as though through the eyes of a photographer… To preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.’ But with that comes a tireless curiosity, presented to us by an omnipresent Ernaux, who has the imagination to transform these all too familiar encounters from daily life into something of real vibrancy and fortitude, and, of course, there’s plenty of feeling built into that act. The same could be said of many of the photographers whose work make up the pages of this book. The people encountered come to us as protagonists of their own stories which we glimpse, move through and then beyond, perhaps inviting us to consider the increasingly unequal social hierarchies pronounced and laid bare in the shared urban environments that we presently occupy, in turn allowing us to reflect on how they might be reimagined. ♦

All images courtesy the artists, MACK and MEP.

Exteriors – Annie Ernaux and Photography runs at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France, until 26 May 2024. The accompanying book is published by MACK.

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Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Claude Dityvon, 18 hears, Post de Bercy, Paris (18 hours, Bridge of Bercy, Paris), 1979. Gelatin silver print, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 1979. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

2-Dolorès Marat, La femme aux Gants (Woman with gloves), 1987. Fresson four-colour pigment print, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 2006. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

3-Dolorès Marat, Neige à Paris (Snow in Paris), 1997. Fresson four-colour pigment print, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 2001. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy of the artist, MACK and MEP.

4-Hiro, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, 1962. Gelatin silverprints, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of the Elsa Peretti Foundation in 2008. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy The Estate of Y. Hiro Wakabayashi, MACK and MEP.

5-Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Ploshchad Vosstaniya – Uprising Square, 2005. Photogravure, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of the artist in 2020. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

6-Janine Niepce, H.L.M. à Vitry. Une mère et son enfant (Council estate in Vitry. A mother and her child), 1965. Gelatin silver prints. MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 1983. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

7-Marie-Paule Nègre, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris (Luxembourg Garden, Paris), 1979. Pigment inkjet print, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of the artist in 2014. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

8-William Klein, Finale de l’élection de Miss France, entourée de Jean-Pierre Foucault et Mme de Fontenay (Final of Miss France contest, surrounded by Jean-Pierre Foucault and Mrs de Fontenay), 2001, from the series PARIS + KLEIN. C-type prints, MEP Collection, Paris. Acquired in 2002. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy William Klein Estate, MACK and MEP.

9-Bernard Pierre Wolff, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 1981. Gelatin silver print, MEP Collection, Paris. Bequest from the artist in 1985. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy the artist, MACK and MEP.

10-Daido Moriyama, Untitled, 1969. Gelatin silver print, MEP Collection, Paris. Gift of Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. in 1995. From Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography (MACK and MEP, 2024). Courtesy Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Akio Nagasawa Gallery, MACK and MEP.

Peter Watkins

The Unforgetting

Essay by Edwin Coomasaru

The Regency Town House, Brighton
04.10.14 – 2.11.14

“There’s this memory I have where we’re driving down a long straight road. The windscreen wipers are going at continuous, and vision is dull and mostly grey. My mother is seated front left, in the passenger side, and my father is driving, wearing a merino jumper with interconnecting diamond shapes; the kind golfers wear. I recall leaning forward and asking a question with an equal measure of naivety and boldness – the kind of question that seems to arise from some existential place that children of a certain age develop. I am curious which of my parents will die first, and I go about asking them their ages. My father, at the wheel, turns his head slightly, and explains that he’s eighteen years older than my mother. I pause briefly, before declaring that in this case my father will die first, followed by my mother, who will die many years later. I forget what my mother was wearing.”

On the 15 February 1993, Peter Watkins’ mother walked off Zandvoort Beach into the North Sea. Her final act haunts Watkins’ series The Unforgetting (2013-14), recently on display at the Regency Town House as part of the 2014 Brighton Photo Fringe. Watkins’ autobiographical photographs incorporate a plethora of sculptural elements, such as casting, stacking and obscuring, and are hung on skeletal timber frames and to draw attention to the listed building’s furnishings. Encouraging connections whilst complicating the relationship between the two, the exhibition contemplates both the role of museums and family histories as sites and discourses of collective memory.

The Unforgetting pieces together fragments from Watkins’ mother’s life. Take Taufe (2014), which depicts the dress she was baptised in. Closely cropped and with a shallow depth of field, there are few indicators of scale: giving the impression that this garment could belong to a grown woman. The deliberate evocation of Ute Watkins’ drowning is imbued with a deeply haunting quality: the floating garment is weightlessly suspended and the net curtain hangs thick like rain. As a result, the spectral character is infused with an impression of liquidity: a molecular materiality, porous and fluid.

Historically water has been associated with femininity, in contrast to the normative male body: robust, firm, muscular and taut – an ideal soldier. Liquidity, associated with blood and wounding, has conventionally been perceived a threat to the hardened surface of a male body. Cuts and tears to the skin are a reminder that the notion of masculine flesh as impenetrable and sealed is a fantasy. Fluids, by their potential capacity to render solids porous, threaten the collapse of borders. This sense of abjection threatens to brim, spill and soak in Taufe. It is almost as though a spectral sea has floated the dress aloft, the muffled silence of the black and white image echoing with underwater acoustics.

The Unforgetting is notable, however, for its lack of tears. While black and white photography is traditionally associated with nostalgia, the work is spared of sentimentality: objects are catalogued and composed in a manner that evokes early scientific photography or evidence gathered at a crime scene. Ancestry (2012) appears rational, ordered, controlled. There is even a sense of stoicism, a hallmark of macho behaviour. Yet, The Unforgetting is also about a man mourning. Consider: Self Portrait (2011), an image that pictures the artist stripped from the waist up and seated on a hard wooden chair. His face is cast down, fist clenched, shoulders hunched. Numerous large circles scar his smooth skin: the legacy of cupping, a well-known Chinese treatment for depression.

Self Portrait is an image of masculinity subject to extreme vulnerability. Reflecting on the US government’s military response to 9/11, gender theorist Judith Butler has considered the pacifist potential of vulnerability: ‘the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other’. In this regard, the relationship between the liquidity in Taufe and the subject‘s portrayal in Self Portrait is key. Together the two works picture a notion of masculinity outside the conventional stereotype. Rather than clad in armour, such a body is traumatised and fragile; given over to its wounding.

Watkins’ potent portrait of the consequences of violence is important to consider at a time when the UK is considering resuming military involvement in Iraq. The Unforgetting testifies to the terrible toll of violence. Taufe’s spectral liquidity provokes reflection on how the notion of the impenetrable, sturdy soldierly-male body is threatened by fluids. Across Watkins’ series an image of masculinity outside the norm emerges – vulnerable and marked by trauma and loss. Self Portrait contests the stoicism and aggressive posturing of macho stereotypes, examining how wounding implicates an individual in their Other – be that an opponent or the external world. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Peter Watkins

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Edwin Coomasuru is the founder and director of the International New Media Gallery. He is also an AHRC-funded student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, writing on Northern Irish masculinities and the legacy of the ‘Troubles’ in contemporary art.