L'AUTRE FILLE
Nadège Fagoo & Annie Ernaux

“Writing to you is nothing more than exploring all your absence. Describing the legacy of absence. You are an empty form impossible to fill with writing. »

1950. Annie Ernaux, 10 years old, learns that she had a sister who died before she was even born. 2011. Annie Ernaux writes a letter to her sister whom she never knew but whose disappearance marked her life. The same year, the photographer Nadège Fagoo was struck by the delicacy of this story and felt a resonance with her images. The photographs seem to shape a visual response to what is unspeakable.

This expanded edition of L'autre fille reflects the struggle of the living “against the long life of the dead”.

This is the first book of the collection Singulières launched by Editions Light Motiv that associates literature and photography.

Like in a mirror game between the writer and the photographer, the collection Singulières explores new ways of dialogue between these two languages (text and image) in the book making.

Based on the latest technical advances in the printing industry regarding colors, contrasts, nuances of photographs on creative paper, the collection establishes a new form that has not yet been explored, the right and striking balance granted between the written content and the visual one.

The text L'autre fille (The Other Girl) written by Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, was initially published in 2011 by Editions NiL.

Technical features

Release date : 20 april 2023
Photographs : Nadège Fagoo
Text (originally published in 2011 by Editions NiL) : Annie Ernaux
Graphic design : Nolwen Lauzanne and Light Motiv
Book format : 14,5 x 21 cm / Weight : 0,500 gr
96 pages - 33 photographs and 37 pages of text
Print run : 4000 copies
Printed cover on ColorPlan Natural 270gr
Photographs (colourful and black and white) and texts on Munken Polar Rough 120gr
Softcover with colourful endpapers
ISBN : 9791095118244
Public price : 23 €

Press

Click to access the press kit.

Excerpts from press articles and bookstore feedbacks:

“From the first pages of the book, a photographic metaphor arose: 'I would like to continue to describe these vacations, to delay. To tell the story of this story will be to put an end to the vagueness of life experience, just like when you process a photo film that has been kept in a cupboard for sixty years and has never been printed.'

It is the photographer Nadège Fagoo who finally processed this intimate photo film, with her own light, her own grammar. A few documentary photos were taken in Yvetot; a long series of others feature two children, embodying the possible faces of this “other girl”. In this configuration, photography which plays equally with the text nourishing it, and which irrigates it in return, consonates, offers its counterpoints, its enigmas, the velvety skin and the faces. »

Hélène Gestern on Autobiosphere

“This book was born from an unexpected encounter. By joining the sharpness and sensitivity of her photographic gaze to the heartbreaking but devoid of nostalgia story of Annie Ernaux, Nadège Fagoo offers us an interpretation of what the power of the image can add to an already strong text. A neat work on childhood, memory and death. »

Clarence – La Chouette Librairie on leslibraires.fr