Everything can be exhibited: trinkets from the Second French Empire, a collection of photographs, a boudoir from beyond the grave, a heroine famous for her beauty, her extravagance and her pitiful end. Everything can be exposed: a woman for another woman... , the fear of one’s own body, a way of entering a scene, the thrill of seduction, abandonment, the reassurance of objects, a ruin.

Over the course of four decades, the Countess Virginia Oldoïni Castiglione returned to the same Paris studio to be photographed, posing in different tableaux to mark the moments of her life, real and imagined. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Léger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.

‘I’ve just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, translated by Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation – history, essay, memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much.’ — Catherine Lacey, iNews

 

‘Exposition is partly a book about ideas of beauty, then, and partly about photography. It pays homage to classics of the genre such as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, without particularly seeking to insert itself into that genealogy. Léger turns away from Castiglione to write about photography, turns away from photography to write about writing, turns away from writing to write about herself – and her mother. This aversion to straightforward narrative is played out through Léger’s loyalty to the fragment as form. She constructs her books from island-paragraphs that float unmoored on the white space of the page, with little attempt to make meaning or argument flow between them. You have to hop from one to the next. Which is not to say that there is no order to what is presented; the links are there to be made by the reader. What narrative flow there is works slowly, and at depth.’ — Jonathan Gibbs

Les Fugitives, 2019, 153pages.