The Mutations of Cultural Memory in Phototexts by Nathalie Léger and Martine Delvaux

This work-in-progress paper will present findings from a chapter of my forthcoming monograph, which studies a series of ‘phototexts’ – literary works combining text and photography – from across the French-speaking world. The chapter in question focuses on two phototexts: Martine Delvaux’s Nan Goldin. Guerrière et Gorgone (2014) [Nan Goldin: The Warrior Medusa] and Nathalie Léger’s L’Exposition (2008) [Exposition]. In these experimental texts, Delvaux and Léger blend autobiographical, biographical and theoretical styles, incorporating personal reflections on their contemporary lives while considering the prolific œuvres of the American artist and activist, Nan Goldin (in Delvaux’s text), and the nineteenth-century Italian self-portraitist, Virginia Oldoini (in Léger’s). To varying degrees and in different ways, Delvaux and Léger explore the social, cultural or political legacies of Goldin and Oldoini and, in Nan and L’Exposition, we learn that the two photographers have in different ways memorialised aspects of their society and culture at precise moments in history. While Oldoini, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues, used photography to entrench conventional ideas about femininity (beauty, elegance, seduction, etc.), Goldin is widely recognised to have resisted dominant narratives of her era, especially those surrounding gender, privilege, class and marginality. My chapter in part explores the ways that Goldin and Oldoini memorialise the past, either by disturbing or reaffirming dominant narratives. My central contention, however, is that in both Nan and L’Exposition, the ideas, values and narratives memorialised through photography are by no means fixed across time: the preservation and transmission of cultural memory can also involve transformation, as memories can take on new meanings as they are interpreted by a present-day audience.

The Speaker 

Beth Kearney (she/elle) is an early career academic and, in June 2026, will begin a new role as Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses broadly on francophone literature and visual cultures (20th-21st centuries); gender studies; global feminisms; and decolonial and transnational theory. Her first monograph, Unfixing the Self in Contemporary Women’s Phototexts of the Francophone World, will be published with Edinburgh University Press. In addition to publishing in academic journals and edited volumes, she regularly writes essays and criticism for public-facing outlets such as The Sydney Review of Books, The Australian Book Review, Asymptote, MAI: Feminism and Visual Cultures, and The Conversation.

Zoom link : https://uqz.zoom.us/j/89861889999