The
winter of 2005-2006 was a turbulent season in Paris. In November riots
blazed in the city’s immigrant suburbs after the accidental electrocution
of two teenagers who had hidden in an electrical station, after reportedly
being chased by police. In March a more affluent group of youth staged
protests and rallies to overturn changes in France’s labor laws
that would have made it easier for employers to fire workers under 26
years of age.
Dissatisfaction, disillusionment and melancholy all broiled beneath
the city’s surface. The human upheaval in the streets clearly
showed that France is in the midst of a social and political transformation,
a country working to deal with the consequences of globalization: from
the poverty and cultural separatism of many of its immigrant communities
to the adjustment of its welfare state to the harsh realities of a global
market.
Where are the signs of change? The non-whites that appear in the French
media are mainly Americans or soccer players. Most of Paris’ 20
arrondissements are predominantly white. The streets are carefully cleaned.
The famous monuments are still perfectly preserved. The boulangeries
serve their delicious croissants, and every neighborhood has its own
chocolate shops and cheese stores.
But, behind the clichés the signs of change are there, if you
look carefully. And, if you venture outside the 20 inner neighborhoods,
signs of change are everywhere. Women wear traditional African dresses.
Billboards advertise rappers and Senegalese singers. Shops sell couscous
and Algerian pastries. Graffiti smears the sides of row on row of suburban
apartment block-housing. Public service posters plead for everyone to
'just get along'.
This winter I decided to photograph the Paris that few visitor see and
many French men and women choose to ignore. Doing so I found a melancholy
city, bound tightly in the constrictions of its orthodoxy and ideals
at its center while those same picturesque illusions disintegrate and
disappear on its periphery.
