Now that all three books exist in English thanks to Dorothy Project and exceptional translations by Natasha Lehrer and Amanda de Marco, it feels as if the stakes have been tripled. When Suite for Barbara Loden first came out, I was drawn, like many others, to the way Léger characterized her project: “I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her story through that of another woman.” There is an unspoken sense of artistic generations here, in the sense that previous women have been buried, both figuratively and literally, by the violence of the male gaze and by the passing of time. In its simplest terms, Léger’s Exposition is the first volume in a triptych that goes on to include Suite for Barbara Loden (which came out to acclaim in 2016), and The White Dress. Each of these books is a portrait of a woman artist, and each is tied to a particular artistic medium, moving from the dawn of photography, through film, to performance. It goes almost without saying that no ordinary autobiography could unleash this kind of insight. “You can’t photograph a memory,” Léger writes, “but you can photograph a ruin.” A few days later, without comment, the narrator finds the photo of her face in the hedge propped on her nightstand. But on the way in, Lautre grabs the camera and photographs something over his shoulder.
Eventually the tension can’t be sustained any longer - the father lowers his camera and carries his mistress inside. The father is transfixed as he clicks the shutter, enveloped through his camera lens. On this afternoon, the child peers through the hedge and witnesses her father photographing his mistress, who is nicknamed Lautre, the other. The other, smaller house is the one her father’s mistress has rented next door. The first house belongs to her mother, to their family. The context for this picture is important: in it, only her childish face is visible, poking from a hedge between two houses. In the middle of Nathalie Léger’s book Exposition, the narrator tells a startling story of the first photograph she remembers of her own face, a photograph taken when she was nine or ten.
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