If you’ve been to Paris, you’ve seen the urban tableaus.
The miscellany of blue-jeaned and be-suited, be-skirted individus hustling from métro station to a host of previously unremarked glass, wood or steel doors of every shape and size, all of which, surely, must lead to some form of, more or less obscure, money-generating activity …
You’ve seen them. The bustlers and moppers in the hotels, the stork-standing servers armed with brown trays haunting the restaurants and cafés, security guys in cheap suits, usually cheerful-seeming, shelf-stockers and cashiers… And firemen! And I’ve only ever seen fire “men”: well-filled, clingy, muscle shirts and pants, discretely streaked with a glisten of attractively trickled sweat, jogging and jiggling hither and yon as the working day clatters open…
You’ve seen them, usually in white or blue pants and lab-style cotton jackets: plumbers, heat and lighting technicians, deliverers, mail-people on yellow bikes saluting concierges, those who gesticulate in the ubiquitous pharmacies and medical-test laboratoires.
Finally, perhaps most especially, you’ve noticed the drivers and passengers of the little white utility trucks that bear mysterious names – the raisons sociales, as they say, of enterprise –“Socranil” or “Cefelec”, “Sofrapup”, “Pippubli” or “Acrosoc”.
At home, many of the above-mentioned tableau thems are my neighbors.
As such, they go back and forth to jobs, have children, pastimes, apartments, taxes to pay, errands to run, points of view, tastes, quiet thoughts, bref, as Robert Graves once famously summed up the routine of life, “all that”.
back and forth
Sarah Meunier, also a neighbor – also a photographer of "street art" who works closely with the Lavo // Matic “graffiti” gallery in the thirteenth arrondissement – has made “street portraits” of many of these, our mutual thems, our mutual neighbors, hors tableau, as they go about their lives. As if for study, an outsize proof sheet of her portraits was hung above the drinks table during the open house of La Fabrique Bagnolet arts center this past Fall.
Meunier has managed to pull forth a certain, almost Hollywoodian, glamor in the familiar, most-often anonymous, human beings whom I run across every day in the stairwell, on the street, at the market, in the stores, in the bus, in the metro: those who animate the thems we see in the Paris tableaus.
I offer these eight Sarah Meunier street portraits as my end-of-year-begin-the-year gift. I offer them as eight reasons to be of good cheer about the true state of humanity, eight reasons to love and esteem the people who make France and, above all, eight reasons to love our neighbors.
Joyeux Noël 2017, Happy New Year 2018.
in the metro
the raisons sociales of enterprise
glamor in the familiar
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