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Paris journal
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June 16, 2024
I have enormous respect for Raymond Depardon, as he is the author of Errance, one of my favourite photo essays of all time. Paris Journal was published around the same time in the early 2000s. While Errance saw the light of day as a tiny paperback on sale for less than 10 euros, the Journal is a 500-page hardcover behemoth. I wish it had been the other way around. Or maybe not. For me, Errance feels like a breviary, with its diminutive size and visual rigour encapsulated in its wide-angle, black-and-white, upright images (all taken with the fabled Alpa SW12 6x9 camera). Paris Journal is much more loosely woven, with images spanning 30 years. Compared to Errance, the feel is more intimate and haphazard, with motifs and textures often jumping from page to page. Short text inserts trace the arc of the photographer's relationship with the French capital, his professional base and the focus of his social network. Most, but not all, of the images are of Paris, or taken in Paris. For the most part, the images have a mundane quality. They don't stand out as artistic images, but as fleeting, cinematographic vignettes of a life lived in the metropolis. This modesty and fluidity gives the book an attractive diary-like quality. I wish I had bought it in the paperback version rather than the angular hardback, the monumentality of which does not sit well with the modesty of the book's ambitions. In Errance, the photographer gives no indication of where the images were taken. In the last hundred pages of Paris Journal, however, there are several references to the travels that underpinned Errance, with references to trips to Algeria, Chad and Patagonia. In this sense, the larger book acts as a useful footnote to the pocket.
Displaying 1 of 1 review