The photographer Hervé Lequeux and the writer Sébastien Deslandes have given us a portrait of Une Jeunesse Française in 208 pages. Having spent six years visiting suburban areas from northern Amiens to northern Marseille, to the outskirts of Paris, Lyon, and Saint-Étienne, they have assembled a volume envisioned as a contribution to the history of the present era: the history of France and its working-class neighborhoods, as well as the history of this little-known segment of youth whose future will be a measure of how much they mean to the country. “We wanted to document the tangled web of the daily lives of these boys and girls residing in large building complexes,” explained Sébastien Deslandes. “What are their concerns, what problems do they tackle? We also wanted to look at differences from one neighborhood in France to the next. Operating over long term as journalists in working-class neighborhoods, and having made the decision to take interest in youth, we necessarily spent long hours together for days on end. We would help them understand our approach; sometimes we’d listen to objections about occasional visitors. This was like crossing the Rubicon: being accepted while being aware about the significance of the trust we’ve established. Apart from our very first steps, taken in Villetaneuse, at a community association helping neighborhood youth enter workforce, we wanted to work directly in the field. In other words, we wanted to take advantage of the existing ties between all the working-class neighborhoods in France in order to penetrate, insofar as it was possible, into the neighborhoods in a different way, outside of an institutional or an organizational framework.”
Hervé Lequeux & Sébastien Deslandes, Une Jeunesse Française
Published by Éditions André Frère
€35
