Exposition

Nathalie Leger

ISBN 10: 1999331834 / ISBN 13: 9781999331832

Published by Les Fugitives, 2019

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G1999331834I4N00

Synopsis:

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 Oldoini returned to the same Paris studio to be photographed, 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 yet over-exposed, adored and despised for her beauty in equal measure, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Leger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.

About the Author: Nathalie Leger is the award-winning author of Suite for Barbara Loden, Exposition, and The White Dress, short experimental novels based on her research work as a curator and archivist. Her UK debut Suite for Barbara Loden (2015) garnered intense critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, and was translated into several European languages. It is credited as being instrumental to the re-release, in American film theatres, of actress and director Barbara Loden's cult cinema- verite masterpiece Wanda (1970). She has curated exhibitions on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett for the Centre Pompidou, and is Director of the Institut Mémoires de l Édition Contemporaine, an organization dedicated to preserving the archives of modern French writers.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Exposition
Publisher: Les Fugitives
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket