Paris has never ceased to be an inspiration for artists, writers, directors and of course photographers. A bubbling, cosmopolitan city, constantly transformed but also rooted in its history, Paris feeds everyone’s experiences, promotes encounters and discoveries. Influenced by fashion, cinema, literature but also by the jolts of everyday life, how does a new generation of photographers observe the City of Light? Is there an ensured continuity, making new representations of a contemporary Paris?
The exhibition Photographing Paris tends to draw a new face of a living and plural city, through the eyes of sixteen artists of all horizons. In a variety of scripts, they are attached to the city or its edges, in an offbeat, unexpected, unusual way. All work with this abundant matter that are its inhabitants, its architecture, its events, its urbanity. All have the ambition of an original look, funny or serious, melancholy or colorful, chaotic or silent. From documentary to intimacy, from personal fiction to the small innocuous moments of reality, they go beyond the anecdotal to deliver a new mosaic, an imaginary cartography of a Paris with multiple languages.
A walk then takes place in the course of the exhibition … Belleville-Ménilmontant, Thomas Boivin meets passers-by and drew their portrait for five years. Ola Rindal, walks around and captures unusual images tinged with fantasy. Yusuf Sevinçli walks, steals images and escapes. Stephan Keppel observes and fragments pieces of the city. Paulien Oltheten settles on a street corner and questions the passer by: why NO? Lucile Boiron engages with migrants and little by little photographs them. Laurent Chardon documents the city and its transformations, lost in a labyrinth with no way out. Peter Tillessen with humor, invents urban microfictions. Sandra Rocha attaches herself to a group of teenagers in the suburbs of Paris and talks to them of love. Geoffroy Mathieu tackles the principle of rurality in Greater Paris and questions the new modes of urban agricultural production. Finally, Louis Matton invent himself as an architect, urban planner, political leader, creating the project Aeroparis. Around these eleven large ensembles, the images of Safouane Ben Slama, Quentin De Briey, Kronental Laurent, Ye Rin Mok, Maxime Verret, visual and poetic counter-fields to the deployed series are articulated.
Through the eyes of these photographers, listening to the present, attentive to the pulsations of the city, it is a new landscape of the capital that is unveiled. Because Paris is so rich, electric, eclectic, and it will always remain the prolific playground of artists, leaving us to glimpse the world of possibilities of a world-city with many facets.
Fannie Escoulen, Pierre Hourquet and Anna Planas – Curators of the exhibition
Photographing Paris – New looks on the city
Until February 2
Paris City Hall
Town Hall Square
75004 Paris
