“Littoral Marseille”, named after the bus stations that line the seaside, in an incredible paradox because if you can walk along the sea for about twenty kilometers, from L’Estaque to Prado beach, you hardly see it, almost not…
It is this paradox that Élise Llinarès explored and photographed, a paradox that Michel Peraldi, anthropologist at the CNRS, deciphers in a committed and very personal text to deconstruct Marseilles myths and plead for a rediscovered use of the coast and the sea.
This book, where photography and anthropology interact, evokes a contemplative stroll along the coast. Page after page, from Estaque to Prado beach, the photographer documents the faces and landscapes as close as possible to the sea.
Images that Michel Peraldi seized on to portray the uses of the coast: poaching, fishing, living, swimming, playing … With nostalgia, sadness and rage, he tells how, since the 19th century, the coast has been monopolized. , polluted.
And becomes, as he himself says “a succession of privatized enclaves and dumps, the cemetery of our lost maritime dreams and practices”.
“From L’Estaque to the Calanques, the Marseille coastline forms a continuous line of 57 kilometers. But if we could unfold all the coves, all the inlets, align the coasts of the islands and put all the docks, all the dikes end to end, it would represent a very vast expanse of which each meter is scrupulously used by the townspeople to access the sea, deploying activities there over a large area which, despite imaginations, storms and appearances, has nothing, absolutely nothing, wild. Or not anymore. “
Extract from the text by Michel Peraldi
Photographer
Élise Llinarès lives and works in Paris. Documentary photographer, she is part of Studio Hans Lucas.
In 1990, enrolled in History at the Sorbonne, she stayed in Berlin to live from the inside consequences of the fall of the Wall and the reunification. She photographed the squats of Potsdam, the streets full of coal smoke, the workers in overalls at the Opera House. From this founding experience, she remembers two things: knowledge of History is fundamental, but History in the making is even more beautiful. And photography has a privileged place to record this real change, is chaotic and sometimes liberating.
Convinced that there is no objectivity in history, her photographic approach is part of a subjective and critical documentary practice. Around the Mediterranean.
The author
Michel Peraldi is an anthropologist, emeritus research director at the CNRS. He has published in particular Marseille en resistances (2020) and Sociologie de Marseille (2015) with La Découverte editions.
For the past twenty years, Michel Peraldi has been developing research combining a sociological and anthropological approach in three areas of research: migratory flows around the Mediterranean basin, including migration from Europe to the Maghreb and from sub-Saharan Africa to the Maghreb. , dynamics and cosmopolitan urban societies, and finally criminal and informal economies.
Littoral Marseille
Élise Llinares – Michel Peraldi
Éditions d’une rive à l’autre
Format 23 x 31 cm
80 pages
46 photographs
64 printed pages in four-color
ISBN 978-2-9569409-0-6
Price 35 € tax incl.
Éditions d’une rive à l’autre
