Author(s): Nathalie Leger (Author) , Amanda DeMarco (Translated by) , Cecile Menon (Edited by

Novel | Read our reviews! | Art | France | Translated fiction | Les Fugitives | Photography | Women's Histories

Description: Over the course of four decades, the Countess Virginia Oldoini Castiglione went to be photographed in the same studio in Paris, posing in different tableaux to mark the moments of her life, real and imagined. A fascination with 'La Castiglione' led Nathalie Leger to weave together this imaginative proto-biography. Mysterious and over-exposed, adored and despised for her beauty in equal measures, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Drawing comparisons with Cindy Sherman and musing on the relationships between the likes of Louise Bourgeois and Robert Mapplethorpe, Marilyn Monroe and Bert Stern, Isabelle Huppert and Roni Horn, Leger examines the myths around icons past and present, meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography and reframes her own family history.

Review: `A tour de force' (Natasha Lehrer). `A subtle novel that explores femininity and its magic spells. Bewitching.'(Vogue). `Highbrow but highly readable; delving deep yet luminous'(...) Through artistic evocation, stream of conciousness, historical detail and personal memory, the author guides us into a world where images become the masks of the real.'(Elle). `Tightly controlled and clear-sighted [...] `a superb study.' (La Croix). `In Nathalie Leger's magnificent text, everything is turned on its head, everything is paradox [...] L'Exposition is the fragile and dangerous attempt to reconstitue the self, to seek, in the secret of another woman - in the insane dramatisation of her silence - the very thing that eludes us within ourselves. Thus it is the ellipsis (the blanks between the fragments) that gives L'exposition its beauty and its truthfulness. A bewitching self-portrait.'(Les Inrockuptibles). `Nathalie Leger brings Castiglione back to life with grace, style and taste.' (Cultures Livres).

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
What is the relation between an atemporal — or, rather, idiotemporal — work and the temporality — or evanescence — both of its creation and of its reading? In photography, as in literature, as in any of the so-called arts — and here we turn back before proposing a ‘useful’ definition of ‘art’ — it is the relationship between passing and unpassing time that forms the unterlayer of our understanding of the work, and of what, if anything, we can see beyond it, if it can be said to have a beyond, and, as with all relationships, whether in the arts or in society, the first question must always be one of power. Who or what is affected by who or what at the instigation of who or what? Which forces are here promulgated and which forces are resisted? What is revealed and what is — perhaps by that revelation — concealed? And, more interestingly, what is concealed and what is — perhaps by that concealment — revealed? The ostensible subject, so to call it, in any work of art is of relative insignificance to these considerations, and to the mechanisms of representation to which they give rise. Ostensibly concerning a four-decades-long series of photographs taken of the Countess Virginia Oldoini Castiglione by the Parisian society photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson from the 1850s to the 1890s, Exposition reveals Léger's thinking on exposure, concealment and over-exposure, on representation and self-representation, on the politics of the gaze especially when concerning the power or otherwise of women, on the limited and limiting truths of photography, on time and history, and also, half-reluctantly but therefore crucially, on uncomfortable aspects of her own family history (for instance, on a childhood photograph of Léger that shows her face peering through some bushes was taken by her father’s lover, who was aware that Léger was gazing at their dalliance when thinking herself unseen). “They contemplated her beauty the way people enjoyed freak shows,” says Léger of Castiglione. From her youth, through her time as mistress of Napoleon III in Second Empire France, through to her declining years, Castiglione was obsessed with the way in which she was seen and conscious always of controlling her self-representation, directing Pierson in a stupefying series of lavishly staged and costumed photographs, some recreating — faking — key moments in her life. This project, with its vapid and cloying results, is the work of a woman determined at all costs to keep a gaze upon her but to reveal nothing of herself. She appears “at once defiant and imploring,” both monstrous and needy. Her self-representation is not that of Cindy Sherman for the first gaze in Sherman’s photographs is Sherman’s own, whereas for Castiglione the first gaze is that of the passive, male, invisible photographer. There is a tyranny in her command of the gaze of others but also a desperation, an existential insecurity, a sense that the subject is lost to herself and — impossibly — seeks assurance in the response of others to the fake self she presents (and long before instagram, too). Photography, “her only mask”, is what makes her both visible and impossible to be seen. There is nothing to Castiglione below the surface — or at least not as far as we can tell — she has made herself into an object, her so-called “beauty” is a characterlessness, a blandness; she is an object that demands no sympathies other than admiration, if admiration can be considered a sympathy. Léger is, rightly, not interested in Castiglione beyond her photographic project, but she is interested in the spaces, the absences, in which the ungraspable could exist if it did exist (“Like death, and one or two other little things the subject is simply the name for what cannot be spoken.”). If ellipses are a means of removing content from a sentence without altering its meaning, how much content is the greatest amount that can be removed while preserving enough meaning to at least simulate coherence? At what point does the process of ellipsis itself become the meaning?  

Author Biography: Nathalie Leger is the award-winning author of Suite for Barbara Loden, now considered the second part of a trilogy that begins with L'Exposition and ends with La robe blanche (French booksellers' award, Prix Wepler 2019). Leger is also a curator, an editor and archivist, and the Director of the IMEC, a national institute dedicated to the archives of 20th- and 21st-century French writers and publishers.

Promotional Information: For fans of Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Leger's first book in English, described on Twitter as a `brilliant little book' by Valeria Luiselli; and one of Eimear McBride's Guardian Books of the Year 2015.