All of her figures - the female director, the performance artist, the most photographed - themselves become vehicles through which Léger tells a more local story of her mother and, most significantly, a story of forgetting. While these women, infamous and maligned, anchor each book, Léger’s triptych reveals a project less concerned with individual stories than with the larger context by which we recognize them. For Léger, the work of “rescuing words” is, in part, a project of plunging into the archive to unearth the forgotten, castigated, yet noted women of history, waylaid by both time and the men who controlled their narratives. When asked about her triptych, now translated in full from the French and published by Dorothy Project, Nathalie Léger suggested that her intention was to “try to rescue the words of a woman who couldn’t utter them herself.” Indeed, Léger’s three books give voice to many women: The Italian aristocrat Countess of Castiglione in Exposition, American film actor and director Barbara Loden in Suite for Barbara Loden, and Italian artist Pippa Bacca in The White Dress.
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