A Photo Report on Cortázar and his Parisian readers
This series of portraits, shot in the streets of Paris, showing fans of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, is a celebration of the centenary of his birth.
Why Cortázar today?
Because he was born a hundred years ago and died 30 years ago. I wanted to do a report on this man of letters who let readers across the world walk the streets and discover Paris.
But how can you shoot a series fit for such a peculiar writer?
The narrative had three requirements: visual, fun and participatory.
-It had to be told through a dialogue between images and text.
-It had to be playful, like hopscotch.
-It had to be participatory, like Hopscotch, a book than can be read from beginning to end, or by following a different order . The work requires the reader’s complicity.
The rules of the report were very simple. The participants had to:
-Choose a passage from Hopscotch mentioning a location in Paris.
-Agree to be photographed on the chosen site.
-Explain why they had chosen it.
The black-and-white photos evoke the passage of time, the fifty years since the publication of Hopscotch. That half a century has been felt very differently in Paris and Buenos Aires.
Read the full article in the French version of L’Oeil.
Hugo Passarello Luna
www.hugopassarello.com/rayuela
