Joyeuses Fêtes! Eight “street portraits” from Sarah Meunier: eight reasons to love suburban Paris

 

all that

About two million people live in the 40 square miles of Paris intramuros, each enjoying an average annual share of national income of 75K €. Five million people, each getting along OK and sometimes not on an annual average 40K share of national income, live in the very rich, very poor and middling communes just beyond the congested ring-road called the "boulevard Périphérique," which was built along the line of the city walls of 1871 between 1956 and 1973. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

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

The nearest suburbs, north & south, east & west, are linked to Paris’ social fabric by metro termini. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

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 people recorded in Sarah Meunier’s street portraits live within an arc defined by the stations Porte de Pantin (Line 5), Mairie de Lilas (Line 11), Gallieni (Line 3), Robespierre, Croix de Chavaux, Mairie de Montreuil (Line 9) and Château de Vincennes (Line 1). ©2017 Sarah Meunier

points of view

Sarah Meunier told me she only recently began doing these portraits, after long hesitation. Although she now says she enjoys the often tense interpersonal negotiation involved in doing a street portrait, getting one doesn’t really get easier with experience. “It’s tricky,” she says. “Taking a photo, it’s like getting into somebody’s private life – “ ©2017 Sarah Meunier

pastimes

“People, generally,” says Sarah Meunier, “they just have a problem with their body image. And that’s really why they are reluctant to be photographed, at least in public.”©2017 Sarah Meunier

 

those who animate

Sarah Meunier uses black and white for its “timelessness”; these are public records, after all. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

                    the raisons sociales of enterprise

Meunier most often accosts her subject in the street, asks permission and does a rough and ready shoot. That’s what she was doing the day we met to talk, going around the neighborhood garage sale, asking to take portraits. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

        glamor in the familiar

Sarah Meunier can also shoot on the sly. She then goes to the subject and shows what she’s done – she says she gives the photo to all the people she takes. This fait accompli approach is difficult, she says, because, while it can capture the un-self-consciousness that so often reveals a human personality’s beauty, she has to “‘hose people down” with the camera if she wants to have a chance of capturing the expression or the look that really brings the person out. © 2017 Sarah Meunier