In collaboration with Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Osuga is honored to support and present a rare exhibition of works by Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize–winning author and one of the most influential literary voices of our time.
This exhibition marks the first authorized presentation of Annie Ernaux’s photographic work in China, offering audiences an intimate encounter with a lesser-seen dimension of her creative practice—one that speaks quietly, yet powerfully, about desire, memory, and the traces we leave behind.
Annie Ernaux: Writing the Personal as Political
Awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux is widely celebrated for her uncompromising commitment to truth. Across decades of writing, she has transformed personal experience—female desire, class mobility, illness, love, shame, time—into a shared, collective language.
Her work dissolves the boundary between private life and public memory. What she writes is never only about herself; it is about how women exist in the world, how intimacy shapes identity, and how memory resists disappearance.
Ernaux does not romanticize experience. She observes it. She records it. And through that act, she gives it weight.
The Use of Photography: When Images Remember for Us
The exhibition draws from The Use of Photography (L’Usage de la photo), a collaborative work created by Annie Ernaux and her partner, photographer Marc Marie.
Rather than photographing bodies or acts, the book documents what remains after intimacy—unmade beds, discarded clothing, quiet rooms marked by presence and absence. Ernaux described these images as “the material traces of desire.”
Each photograph is paired with text. The images do not illustrate the writing; the writing does not explain the images. Instead, they coexist—allowing memory, imagination, and emotion to complete what is unseen.
As Ernaux writes: “Only when these written photographs transform, in the reader’s memory or imagination, into other scenes, do we reach the highest degree of truth.”
This is not voyeurism. It is witnessing.
A Shared Commitment to Female Narrative
This exhibition invites viewers to slow down. To look not for spectacle, but for resonance. To consider how memory lives in objects, rooms, and silence.
As a brand rooted in female experience, intimacy, and bodily autonomy, we are deeply moved by Ernaux’s approach to desire—not as spectacle, but as lived reality.
Supporting this exhibition is not about sponsorship alone. It is about standing alongside a woman who has spent her life insisting that female experience is worthy of attention, of documentation, of art.
Ernaux shows us that desire does not need to be loud to be powerful—and that women’s inner lives deserve space, language, and respect.
Closing
Annie Ernaux once wrote that she wanted to write in a way that would make her life “useful to others.”
In presenting The Use of Photography, we hope to extend that usefulness—to offer a space where intimacy is not consumed, but contemplated; where desire is not simplified, but understood; and where women’s experiences are held with the seriousness and tenderness they deserve.
This is an exhibition about what remains. And about why what remains matters.
