The Lumière des roses gallery presents La Zone (rough area), at the gates of Paris.
Some words are like wasteland: we understand their meaning, but it’s hard to define exactly. The expression “la zone” is one of them; today it evokes the vagueness of the suburbs, a form of boredom or the threshold of delinquency, but it is often not known that it is anchored in a precise historical reality.
In the nineteenth century, the Zone designated a strip of land 250 m wide that ran along the 34 km of fortifications built around Paris in 1844. This non aedificandi area was to remain unoccupied for the needs of the military defense of Paris, but it is progressively occupied by a poor population that settles durably building precarious dwellings, huts and shacks of all kinds, which eventually formed a huge slum sheltering more than 40,000 people in the inter-war period. It was at this period that the expulsions began, which accelerated under the Vichy regime. The last vestiges of this territory on the margins will disappear permanently with the construction of the ring road starting in 1956.
With the exception of some famous photographers like Eugène Atget, Germaine Krull or André Kertész, the photography of the inter-war years was not interested in this urban and social phenomenon. As a result, the majority of the photographs exhibited are the work of anonymous photographers who often responded to orders designed to support the thesis of insalubrity that would justify the demolition of the Zone. However, while fixing the image of slum, these photographic campaigns recorded valuable information on ways of living. The materials used to make the houses, the details of the interiors, the heaps of objects are all indications of the DIY genius of the zoners, an art of recovery and recycling, a freedom to build on a territory which escaped urban norms.
This unpublished set of documentary photographs has been collected by the Lumière des roses gallery for years. Far from misleading clichés, it restores life and dignity to a territory and a population relegated to the outskirts of the capital as a backside of the modern city that was hastily forgotten.
Curators of the exhibition: Marion and Philippe Jacquier, Zoé Barthélémy.
Scientific Advisor: Anne Granier.
Exhibition co-produced by the Lumière des roses gallery and the Rencontres d’Arles.
La Zone, aux portes de Paris
Croisière
July 1 – September 22
