Abstract: Across her literary œuvre, Ernaux tends to frame photography as a medium capable of lending her life and experiences a sense of permanence, as well as concreteness, solidity. Yet a recent re-release of Ernaux's 2011 text, L'autre fille , contains illustrations that are aesthetically distinct from the archival photographs that so frequently appear in her literature. Most of the photographs that Ernaux's collaborator, Nadège Fagoo, contributes to this new, 2023 edition have an oneiric aesthetic—a far cry from the archival shots that appear elsewhere in Ernaux's œuvre and that she tends to consider as sociocultural documents. In this essay, I suggest that in this collaborative edition of L'autre fille , photography appears as a medium of the utmost equivocality. Rather than render lived experience more concrete, the medium troubles the real.
Beth Kearney (Wed,) studied this question.