The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography 1800856024, 9781800856028

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Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 75 Edward J. Hughes, Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative 76 Anna Kemp, Life as Creative Constraint: Autobiography and the Oulipo 77 Maria Kathryn Tomlinson, From Menstruation to the Menopause: The Female Fertility Cycle in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French 78 Kaoutar Harchi and Alexis Pernsteiner, I Have Only One Language, and It Is Not Mine: A Struggle for Recognition

79 Alison Rice, Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music 80 Antonia Wimbush, Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile 81 Jacqueline Couti, Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924–1948 82 Debra Kelly, Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century 83 Nikolaj Lübecker, Twenty-FirstCentury Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé

The Topographic Imaginary Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 84

First published 2022 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2022 Ari J. Blatt Ari J. Blatt has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this book in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-80085-602-8 eISBN 978-1-80085-556-4 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

For Benjamin and Raphaëlle

Contents Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Construction Sights

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2 Peripheral Visions, or Paris Orbital

61

3 Mission: France

93

4 Thick Landscapes

115

5 Roots and Routes

143

Coda: On the Ruins of Empire

171

Bibliography 185 Index 205

Acknowledgments Acknowledgements

Where to start? At the University of Virginia, my colleagues, students, and friends in the Department of French have been an incredible source of inspiration and support throughout my career so far, and I thank them all for fostering such a lovely atmosphere in which to work. I am especially lucky to have benefited from the superb mentorship of John Lyons and Deborah McGrady. Gary Ferguson and Janet Horne were wonderful chairpersons as I researched and wrote this book. In the Dean’s Office, I thank Edward Barnaby, Ian Baucom, Francesca Fiorani, and Alison Levine, all of whom backed this project in ways they likely do not even realize. A Sesquicentennial Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences provided me much-needed time to reboot and start working on this book in earnest. A fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures and a generous grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research provided resources as I entered the final stages. The team at the University of Virginia Libraries has also been tremendous. I am indebted to the people and institutions who made possible publication of the photographs that grace this book’s pages. Many thanks to the artists and their representatives who have granted me permission to reprint their work here. Emmanuelle Blanc, Béatrix von Conta, Stéphane Couturier, Camille Fallet, Marc Petitjean, Gérard Dalla Santa, and Patrick Tourneboeuf were generous with their time as well. I have enjoyed getting to know Thomas Jorion over the years, and watching his career take off. Thierry Girard has encouraged with gusto my outsider’s interest in contemporary French photography, and I am delighted to consider him a friend. I conducted a significant portion of the research for this book while living in Paris. I was fortunate to meet several people there who have shaped my thinking about French photography and its relation to the

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territoire in many complementary ways. Thanks to Jean-Christophe Bailly, Raphaële Bertho, the late François Brunet, Antoine Cardi, Éric Cez, Yannick Le Marec, Danièle Méaux, Kathrin Yacavone, and Pia Viewing. Patrick Bray, Edward Welch, and Lawrence Kritzman read various drafts, and I thank them for being so supportive. My delightful writing partners in Charlottesville, Jennifer Sessions and Dale Winling, kept me accountable week after week. And many thanks to the top-notch editorial and production teams at Liverpool University Press, to the anonymous readers for the gift of their generous and rigorous reviews of the manuscript, and to Chloé Johnson, who shepherded this book through the publication process with admirable efficiency and care. Of course, while various friends, colleagues, and institutions all contribute to making a book like this a reality, none of it would have been possible were it not for the unwavering support, over many years and through personal and collective crises of all kinds, of my family. Thank you to the folks in France, especially Marie-Françoise, Alain, Gwenaëlle, Benoît, Arthur, Clément, Victoire, and Jean-Pierre. And to those closer to home: Jessica and Adam, Etan and Trish, Talya and A.J. My father has been an extraordinary guide over the years. My mother too, zichronah livracha. My wife is, in a word, the best. Thank you, Solène. While I dedicated my first book to her, this one is for our two amazing kids. ***

A portion of Chapter Five on the photography of Raymond Depardon was first published in Contemporary French Civilization 39:2 (July 2014). An earlier version of my chapter on French photographic missions (Chapter Three) appeared in France in Flux: Space, Territory and Contemporary Culture, edited by Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). I thank the publishers for their permission to reprise that material here.

Introduction Introduction

It seems, broadly, good to be stopped by a place. —Tim Dee1 We do not spontaneously go to places that do not expressly draw our attention. —Pierre Bergounioux2 Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along. —Jenny Odell3

On a cloudy spring morning in 2018, from the parking lot of a Carrefour shopping center in Liévin, a modest town in France’s post-industrial north, Thierry Girard set off for a walk. Equipped with a backpack filled with photographic gear, his camera affixed to a tripod slung over his shoulder, he crossed the street and circumnavigated a traffic circle. He then began strolling down a sidewalk, immersing himself in the terrain, as if waiting for something to catch his eye. From the sight of it, 1 Tim Dee, “Introduction,” Ground Work: Writings on People and Places, ed. Dee (London: Vintage, 2018), 1. 2 Pierre Bergounioux, “Friches,” in Joël Leick and Bergounioux, Friches (Grâne: Créaphis, 2012), 8. Throughout The Topographic Imaginary, this and all subsequent translations from the French are my own unless otherwise noted. 3 Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (New York: Melville House, 2019), 125.

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one would be hard pressed to tell what it was about this most pedestrian of places, a busy commercial zone on the outskirts of a small town in a disaffected former mining region in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, that would draw one of France’s most talented contemporary artists. Girard was in Liévin that day as part of a short-term residency sponsored by a nearby cultural center whose administration had commissioned him to do what he has become famous for: namely, for crafting a photographic vision of the real that reminds us that even ordinary and unremarkable landscapes contribute to our collective imaging and imagining of place. This was not the first time Girard had spent extended time in this area made famous by Zola in his 1885 novel, Germinal, and which has since continued to suffer the ravages of history: from bombing campaigns that razed several nearby cities and towns during the two world wars to catastrophic mining disasters and the widespread economic hardship that followed the decline of the coal extraction industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Having worked in the region before, Girard has become something of an expert at uncovering the traumas of this place’s past, and at tracking the ghosts left behind. To explore the area through Girard’s pictures is to discover a landscape scarred by over a century of deep human burrowing and dotted with over 300 slag heaps rising pointedly, some as much as 140 meters high, above the surface of the region’s mostly flat ground. Eschewing historic city centers, picturesque countryside views, and other attractions that would be “worth a detour” in the Michelin guide, preferring instead to take the road less traveled to sites marked by a confluence of past and present that often lie somewhere off the beaten path, Girard’s practice interrogates places that might otherwise leave us indifferent but which, as his photographs suggest, are perhaps more storied than they initially seem. Advancing slowly now, the photographer scans from side to side and takes a breath in anticipation, as if something unforeseen could come about, a minor “epiphany, at once modest and sublime,”4 materializing out of thin air. And then something about the place stops him, quite literally, in his tracks. Girard plants his tripod, adjusts its height, and gazes through the viewfinder to frame the scene. While that day he was using a digital, medium-format camera, a device that takes 4 Thierry Girard, “Par les forêts et par les villages de l’Est,” Des Images et des mots, December 5, 2016, https://wordspics.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/ par-les-forets-et-par-les-villages-de-lest/.

Introduction

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considerable time and expertise to operate, over the past three decades Girard has worked primarily with medium- and large-format analogue cameras. Thanks to his mastery of the medium in its photo-chemical declination, his procedure is at once meticulous and patient. For some, it might appear quaintly retrograde, a reminder of the way certain photographic forebears composed views of the landscape over a century and a half ago. Although his work is indebted to past masters, his vision of place—which Girard always understands as a dynamic cultural process5—is also resolutely current. Like the other artists featured in the chapters to follow, Girard makes pictures that exemplify what I term the “topographic imaginary” in contemporary French photography. They meld documentary and creative modes to turn topographic reality, “the natural and built features of a place,”6 into a representation. And they subtly deploy a variety of rhetorical and aesthetic devices designed to give that reality symbolic form, transforming a spot on the map into an idea in the mind. Outwardly laconic and seemingly dispassionate, but always open to speculative and sometimes conflicting interpretations, these images and others like them constitute records of actual places at particular moments in time as much as they serve as supports onto which viewers might project their own lived experience, thoughts, memories, obsessions, and dreams. After a few adjustments, Girard steps back and bides his time for several seconds so that the conditions—the light, the traffic, and the two passersby, oblivious to his presence—can settle just so. And then, with a press of a button on the remote shutter release, he shoots. The 5 Definitions of the term “place” are legion. For my purposes here, with regard to images in which people figure only sparingly, even though their impact almost always makes itself felt, I subscribe to Robert Pogue Harrison’s succinct conception of place as a space that has been domesticated: “Places do not occur naturally but are created by human beings through some mark or sign of human presence.” See Harrison, “Hic Jacet,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 350. Perhaps because people come and go and circulate through and within places over time, the photographs discussed in this book, Girard’s work included, also implicitly conceive of place as Jos Smith does, namely as “an open-ended and experimental process, an ongoing performance of social and cultural reality.” See Smith, The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 21. 6 Lisa Cartwright, “Topographies of Feeling: On Catherine Opie’s American Football Landscapes,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 300.

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image, which will later be printed, framed, exposed on a gallery wall, and published in book form, represents a site that appears ubiquitous (see Figure 0.1).7 Looking more closely, however, one begins to sense how this place is nevertheless rich with significance. For within it, the photograph brings together the mundanity of daily life on the edge of a downtrodden French town with the remnants of an important moment in France’s industrial history. Beyond the bushy foreground, where viewers can discern a service station at the center of the frame and an array of commercial signage, the photograph draws the eye to the hulking aspect of not one but two of the century-old headframes that one still finds scattered about in unlikely places in cities and towns throughout this part of France. Mirrored in the pair of red banners visible in the foreground, the steel winding towers rise above it all, dominating the scene like the steeple atop a church visible on the center-left.8 These stalwart remnants of more than a century of mining are as crucial to the identity of this region as the many coal tips that are equally prevalent in these parts.9 Together they embody the history of industrialization, the exploitation of labor (note the banner advertising the “Prix le plus bas!” or “Lowest Price!”), and the degradation of the environment in one of France’s most economically embattled territories. While this terrene peri-urban landscape has been molded over time to conform to various municipal imperatives, Girard’s photograph suggests how local planning, space management, and development on various scales can

7 This picture, and others Girard made during the same residency, were shown several times between 2017 and 2019, notably in an exhibition at the Maison de l’ingénieur at the Cité des Électriciens, in Bruay-la-Buissière (May–December 2019). Many of the exhibited images were published with a selection of photographs from Girard’s archive representing almost 40 years of work in this region in northern France. See Thierry Girard, Le Monde d’après (La Madeleine: Éditions Light Motiv, 2019). 8 This is the church of Saint-Amé in Liévin, named after Amé Tilloy, an industrialist who helped to develop the mining industry in and around Lens. The church was built in the 1870s next to an excavation site, pit number 3-3 bis (also known as the Saint-Amé pit), that became infamous after an explosion there killed 42 miners in the winter of 1974. 9 Several documentary films have also explored the post-industrial landscapes of France’s northern mining basin. See Derek Schilling, “Disuse and Affect: Post-Industrial Landscapes of France’s Labour Lost,” in France in Flux: Space, Territory and Contemporary Culture, ed. Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2019), 35–62.

Introduction

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reveal traces of the past that the winds of progress, inadvertently or not, often manage to obscure. The photograph might at first appear aseptic and inert, the simple sighting of a “street view” that Google could coldly pinpoint on a digital map. Like many of the photographers I study elsewhere in this book, Girard makes pictures marked by a rhetoric of neutrality, unbeholden to the codes of pictorialism. Girard’s approach neither enhances the site nor accentuates its everydayness. Nor does it make any pretense to please. Yet if the photograph brings to mind what curator William Ewing calls “the cool appraisal” of the surveyor whose job it is “to take stock, not to pass judgment,”10 it is also firmly rooted in the subjective experience and aesthetic sensibility of its maker. Another photographer working in a similarly observational mode would likely not have chosen this place or this point of view. And even if one did, would they have decided to compose, frame, focus, and shoot, or develop, expose, print, and publish it in the same way? As geographer D.W. Meinig writes, there are as many ways to observe a landscape as there are people to make sense of it, for “any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.”11 When a photographer like Thierry Girard makes a picture, he transmits a singular impression of a place that he deems worthy of sustained contemplation. One of the main contentions of The Topographic Imaginary is that pictures like these, made across the nation by artists like Girard and a cadre of his similarly “topophilic”12 contemporaries, constitute a transformative way of envisioning what on the surface seem like perfectly mundane locations, but which the photographs endorse as landscapes empowered with the capacity to 10 William Ewing, Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 21. 11 D.W. Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34. 12 Kitty Hauser, writing about W.H. Auden’s conceptualization of a certain kind of British literary and visual “topohilia” from the 1930s and 1940s, notes that “topophiles” exhibit “an interest, sometimes amounting to an obsession, with local landscapes.” See Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s oft-cited understanding of the term—“an affective bond between people and place or setting”—can perhaps be applied more universally. See Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 4.

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expand and indeed “scape” viewers’ way of seeing, experiencing, and apprehending the diverse territories that comprise modern France.13 Thierry Girard is part of a large and growing cohort of artists whose work immerses itself, and its viewers, in French places. In 1970, Henri Cartier-Bresson commented on how vexing it had become for him to make photographs of France: “It is more difficult to show one’s own country than others that we visit because home lacks the element of surprise. It is at once familiar and unfamiliar,” he said, “and it can be tough to negotiate between the two.”14 Shortly thereafter, for reasons 13 I borrow the notion of landscape’s power to “scape” us from Robert Macfarlane, who writes that while landscape is often still understood as a fixed scene or point of view, whether we see that scene in a visual representation or experience it in the world with our own bodies, eyes, and mind, the word also contains this very useful, hidden verb. For Macfarlane, “landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident.” See Macfarlane, The Old Ways (London: Penguin, 2012), 255. Of course, scholars from a diverse array of fields have proposed an almost dizzying number of other ways to define what landscape is, and what it does. I am partial to Liz Wells’s useful understanding of the term, which she defines succinctly as “vistas encompassing both nature and the changes that humans have effected on the natural world.” See Wells, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 2. For others, “landscape” has become an increasingly vexed and slippery term. On the difficulty we face pinning landscape down, because we “cannot properly see it (whatever ‘it’ is), and this in part because we do not know exactly what we are looking for,” see Rachel DeLue, “Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds,” in Landscape Theory, ed. DeLue and James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2007), 10. Jean-Marc Besse echoes DeLue when he explains that defining the term has become so fraught because landscape is now the purview of multiple disciplines that have each appropriated it for their own uses. See Besse, Le Goût du monde. Exercices de paysage (Arles: Actes Sud, 2009), 15. Finally, cultural geographer Tim Cresswell has gone so far as to shun the term “landscape” from his academic vocabulary, though he does a fine job elucidating how that very term has evolved in his own field over the years. See Cresswell, “Landscape and the Obliteration of Practice,” in Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 269–82. 14 Cartier-Bresson uttered these words on a radio show broadcast by France Culture on October 24, 1970. Quoted in Jean-Pierre Montier, “Un ‘photobook’ inscrit dans la tradition des tours de France: Sur Vive la France de Henri CartierBresson et François Nourissier,” in La France en albums, 19e–21e siècles, ed. Philippe Antoine, Danièle Méaux, and Jean-Pierre Montier (Paris: Hermann, 2017), 192.

Introduction

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that will become clearer further on, the next generation of art photographers would begin taking this idea to heart and putting its credibility to the test by repeatedly training their lenses on the country they call home. Particularly sensitive to the physiognomic state of the nation— and to environments both natural and human-made—the pictures they produce depict distinct sectors of terrain from throughout urban, peri-urban, and rural France. From Stéphane Couturier’s excavation of Parisian construction sites seen from the inside and Camille Fallet’s visual record of places located deep within the Greater Paris periphery (in which clear-sighted viewers might catch a glimpse of the French capital from far out), to Emmanuelle Blanc’s dizzying inquiry into anthropogenic activity high in the Alps and Thibaut Cuisset’s painterly impressions of the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy, to name just a few examples, the photographs and series of photographs under scrutiny in the chapters to follow make visible the variegated contours and surface features of sites that lack any overt aesthetic appeal. As they investigate various “zones of the real” that would normally elude us—because of their “profound triviality, their inacceptable banality, or their unworthy familiarity”15—these images help shape our gaze on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century France. They invest unheralded and “vernacular”16 landscapes with meaning and renegotiate how the nation has come to be seen, enlisting photography as an important implement for national self-fashioning. They revisit, challenge, and disorient dominant conceptions associated with the French photographic tradition and the mythologies it has engendered. And they show how contemporary photographers employ the medium and experiment with its conventions to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of the country’s shared common space, or what the French refer to as the national territoire.17 15 André Rouillé, La Photographie. Entre document et art contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 560. 16 I borrow the adjective from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s seminal study of ordinary American landscapes, which he describes as a “composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence,” in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 8. 17 Not unlike “landscape,” the meaning of the term territoire is often ambiguous, having been appropriated over time by various fields to various ends. Nevertheless, it is used commonly in France mostly by politicians and technocrats and, as Alain Faure suggests, is even marked by a French specificity that makes it difficult to

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Attending to Place The photographs examined in this book accomplish all of this by virtue of their sustained attention to place. These days, paying attention to anything, let alone something as commonplace as a common place, has become a fraught proposition. As scholars have remarked, to be alive in the twenty-first century is to participate, often involuntarily, in an “economy of attention” in which our gradually waning ability to focus consciously on one thing at any one time has become a valuable form of capital.18 While western culture has fretted over the “disintegration of attention”19 for more than 1,500 years, it seems that the increasingly tight, technology-driven compression of time and space has aggravated the situation to a level that threatens our very capacity to coexist. Mathew Crawford, for example, writes about a long and historical arc of cultural distraction that has resulted in a distressing “crisis of attention” only made worse by an obsession with screens that prevents us from “attending to real objects and to other people.”20 Still others have lamented the loss of intimacy and authenticity that has accompanied the development of artificial intelligence, networked living, and sociable robotics, and have exposed the undesirable neurocognitive effects that mechanisms of diversion have been shown to cause.21 translate into English. See Faure, “Quelques éléments de réflexion sur la notion de territoire,” Séminaire Cap’ Com, “In-tercommunalité: une communication à réinventer,” Paris, Sénat, Territoires/Territorialisation (July 2006), 1. Throughout this book, my use of the term aligns most closely with Danièle Méaux’s succinct definition of the territoire as “a bounded geographic area marked by a certain political and cultural cohesion.” See Méaux, “Introduction. Des ‘livres-territoires’,” in La France en albums, 19e–21e siècles, ed. Philippe Antoine, Danièle Méaux, and Jean-Pierre Montier (Paris: Hermann, 2017), 5. 18 Yves Citton, for example, argues that our computers and smartphones serve as profit-generating machines for companies seeking to cash in on our awareness. See Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 27. 19 Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1. 20 Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), ix–x. 21 See, in particular, Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012) and Tiziano Terranova, “Attention, the Economy and the Brain,” Culture Machine 13 (2012), 1–19. For a discussion of the science that suggests how new media technologies are

Introduction

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Despite how connected we may be with places and the people that live in them around the globe, our experience of the places we encounter and inhabit in daily life has become comparatively impoverished. As the thinkers mentioned above suggest provocatively, the stakes are high. Among other dangers, at risk is our desire and perhaps even our ability to immerse ourselves in the surrounding environment. Robert Macfarlane, for example, writes about how our “simulated lives” threaten to diminish our competence to commune with, and to talk with precision about, the landscapes in which we live.22 Photography, on the other hand, and especially the kind of topographically aware photography that takes as its subject an array of places across France, manifests a tactical way of weathering the forces that distract us. Representing a kind of “attentional prosthesis” that, for Jenny Odell, “assumes that the familiar and proximate environment is as deserving of [our] attention, if not more, than those hallowed objects we view in a museum,”23 these photographs have the capacity to alter our visual, intellectual, and affective modes of reception and anchor our perception to those places that are before, besides, and quite literally beneath us, but to which we seldom pay heed. That many of them often do so while hanging on the walls of a gallery or museum only adds to their appeal. “Modernity,” as naturalist Tim Dee notes, “has shattered our world like never before, we are more deracinated than ever, but because we feel most places to be nowhere we have also learned that anywhere can be a somewhere.” The Topographic Imaginary argues that contemporary French photography has a role to play in this crucial spatial recalibration, capable of creating a “somewhere” out of “nowhere” and demonstrating how “all of our thought to rewire neural pathways, see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). 22 Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (London: Penguin, 2016), 3–4. Among Macfarlane’s many worries is the decline in our collective ability to speak the language of landscape and name the things—like birds, insects, and other animals, landforms, or species of plants and trees—that we find in nature. John Stilgoe recommends a useful corrective: “Looking around, walking and noticing and thinking, putting words to things, especially simple things, enables and empowers and pleases: discovering landscape is inexpensive, good exercise for body and mind, and leads to satisfying and often surprising discovery.” He also suggests we ask locals to help us name what we see and, when in doubt, use a dictionary. See John Stilgoe, What Is Landscape? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), xiii–xiv. 23 Odell, How to Do Nothing, 101.

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habitat is relevant: not just the pretty bits.”24 At a time when most photography isn’t really photography at all but instead a form used to “enhance communication […] like a period at the end of a sentence,” at a moment when “we are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them,”25 the kind of carefully conceived and deliberately place-conscious photography that I examine here represents a vital form of cultural praxis that attunes viewers to a world of prosaic but not insignificant places that mainstream culture tends to tune out. One might very well object to this claim by asking how a photograph can encourage a more attentive, engaged, and immersive experience of place if our experience of a place represented in a photograph is a mediated one. Surely, as I hinted earlier, viewers of Thierry Girard’s photographs cannot hear the sounds or smell the smells or sense the air on their face or the land beneath their feet in the way that the photographer himself must have experienced these things at the moment the picture was made. I would suggest, however, that because each photograph and photographic series pays attention with such intention, because they provide viewers some much-needed purchase on select parcels of a vast yet surprisingly well consolidated national landscape (that France’s characteristic geological diversity is harmoniously ordered and contained within of a set of natural borders is often a point of pride for its inhabitants), and because they insist on looking at landscape in a refreshingly mindful way, this corpus of creative topographic photography is especially well suited to reorienting our gaze and bringing us into greater proximity with places that, as Odell remarks in the epigraph above, seem both uncannily familiar and alien at once. The material conditions by which these photographs are produced, displayed, and disseminated matter appreciably in this regard. For one, many of the photographs in this book were made by photographers working on the ground, over extended periods, with specialized equipment that allows for meticulous observation, scrupulous rendering, and considerable depth of field. Far from a point-and-shoot style of picture making, the often unwieldy and delicate materials—which include medium- and large-format view cameras mounted on tripods, equipped with focusing hoods, and loaded with expensive sheet film—demand 24 Dee, “Introduction,” 6. 25 Om Malik, “In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing,” The New Yorker, April 4, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/business/ currency/in-the-future-we-will-photograph-everything-and-look-at-nothing.

Introduction

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that photographers take their time and choose their subjects wisely. The photographs produced by this process encourage viewers to look at them in a similarly measured way. Topographic photography often embraces what photographer and critic Paul Lowe calls a “forensic aesthetic” that elicits an especially slow and deliberate form of spectatorship. For Lowe, micro-level details become “the most salient features” that draw viewers into an active process of scanning the photograph, positioning them in dialog with the image, and necessitating an investigative mode of engagement. The focus is often on the viewer deciphering the meaning of the image through a detailed exploration of the surface of the photograph, and a simultaneous imaginative reading of its topography.26

Moreover, since topographic photographs are often produced as part of larger series, some containing as many as several hundred images (selected from a vast array of preparatory contact sheets, negatives, and digital files), forensic investigation of the places they depict is a cumulative process, one in which viewers become accustomed to identifying and interpreting patterns in a place’s iteration. When these series or portions of them are exposed on the walls of an art institution or published, as most of them are, in carefully conceived and beautifully bound photobooks, they then take on a “public life” that allows for sustained contemplation by many viewers over time.27 26 Paul Lowe, “Traces of Traces: Time, Space, Objects, and the Forensic Turn in Photography,” Humanities 7:76 (2018), 6. 27 See Thierry Gervais, The “Public” Life of Photographs (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). While researching this book, I had the opportunity to view some of the photographs considered here firsthand in exhibitions and in visits to artists’ studios in France. When experienced in these privileged settings, especially in the mediated context of a curated show, the impact of scale and the embodied and positional form of encounter with the image can be quite profound. That said, my work is in large part indebted to the publication of these images in book form. While engaging with photographs through their reproduction in livres de photographie or “photobooks,” as the genre has come to be known, certainly has its limitations (not only do photobooks often shrink the size of certain reproductions, they can also be quite expensive), the format nevertheless has many benefits. Along with providing an artist or a collective of artists a platform for the expression of a cohesive vision, photobooks allow for the global circulation of this vision to a wide audience. And since all exhibitions inevitably come to an end, the photobook accords the photographic series with a kind of permanence that it otherwise would not have. For more on the emergence and importance of the photobook as a form of art unto itself, see especially, Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal

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Topographic photography of urban, peri-urban, and rural landscapes may at first seem lifeless and impersonal, especially since many of the practitioners discussed here expressly refrain from including human subjects in the frame. When people do occasionally appear, as in the photograph that Thierry Girard made in Liévin discussed above, they hardly ever return the viewer’s gaze. Instead, the generalized elision of the people that might inhabit and transit through the places depicted in these photographs confers a strong sense of agency to the landscapes on display. Topographic photographs endow features of the natural and built environment, from animate organisms to inanimate objects, with a kind of intensity or what Jane Bennett terms “vital materiality” that exerts a special pull on viewers who are free to roam all over the place, as it were, uninhibited by the presence of visages or bodies that would stand out, draw the eye, and potentially even acknowledge our regard.28 In spite of the relatively unpeopled nature of these compositions, then, I would argue that it is precisely by virtue of their observational and evidentiary force that these images in fact catalyze a profoundly human experience of place. As they illuminate the most granular details of the terrain, paying close attention in their sheer frontality to the size, scale, and relief, and to the masses, volumes, and lines that inform each composition and define the limits of the frame, these images create the conditions for an encounter that has the capacity to elicit an embodied, multisensory experience. As Lisa Cartwright argues, topographic photography is more than merely visual. It “emphasize[s] what can be known of a place through its surface contours, natural and human-made.” A photograph that takes a site as its subject, rather than relegating it to the background, Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (New York: PPP Editions, 2001); Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, eds, The Photobook: A History, 3 vols (London: Phaidon, 2004, 2006, 2014); Patrizia di Bello, Colette Wilson, and Shamoon Zamir, eds, The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012); and Paul Edwards, Perle noire. Le photobook littéraire (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016). 28 For Bennett, non-human or not-quite-human things are laden with a vibrancy that has the power to affect us, to produce effects on us. From tangible objects like roads, trees, and buildings to more atmospheric and elemental phenomena like clouds, air, and morning mist, these things act upon human beings “as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Materialism: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), vii–viii.

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offers a particular feel for a place, a grounded feel for what bodies would sense as they move across that place, and a sense of the specificity of bodily experience as always bound not just to any place or one general place, but to the specific and shifting physical qualities that assign a given topos its particular feeling as one moves in and around it. Topographic feeling, in this sense, is a sensual, tactile, physically grounded feeling for the transitional qualities of a place across which a body can be imagined to move. It is a feeling of connectedness to the ground that can be imagined from an optical standpoint outside that space.29

While they cannot replace the reality of lived experience in situ, topographic photographs nevertheless invite viewers to come to grips with the landscapes they depict by offering what Liz Wells calls “some form of imaginary substitute”30 for a tangible sense of place. Which is to say that these images induce a visionary impression and indeed a feeling of “what it is like to ‘be there’.”31 The multisensory and more-than-representational potential of topographic photography is matched by a promise of supra-optical revelation, for its ability to make the invisible visible. American photographer Emmet Gowin might have put it best when he said that photography, “is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to.” For photographs habitually “represent something you don’t see.”32 If topographic photographs steer us toward a point of view, from the moment the artist conceives of, composes, and shoots a landscape, through developing, editing, printing, exposition, and publication, photography mobilizes techniques at all stages of the process to open our awareness onto elements that we might have missed. The images discussed in the following chapters are united in the way they isolate, envision, and frame places so that viewers can consider them closely and, in doing so, develop their own sensitivity to, and perhaps be surprised by, features that would otherwise remain indistinct. 29 Lisa Cartwright, “Topographies of Feeling,” 300–1. 30 As Wells explains: “Experiencing a photograph cannot be the same as experiencing an actual place. Environmental photography conveys something of how places look, and, through attention to texture, how things might feel. They do not convey the haptic (sensory) affects of sound, smell and taste; but memory brings such sensations into associative play.” Wells, Land Matters, 44. 31 Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 8. 32 Emmet Gowin, qtd. in Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1989), 200.

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Considered together, then, these pictures collectively inspect the surface level or skin of the national territoire. They highlight the improbable quality of interstitial spaces, invite viewers to engage critically and, as Lowe suggests, imaginatively with those surfaces, and inquire into what writer Michel Chaillou calls, “the feeling that this country, composed of myriad sites that allow us get our bearings, also comprises other, more furtive locales. We have yet to establish a cartography of that which refuses to reveal itself at first glance.”33 If the medium detects more than the human eye can see, it is perhaps because the camera does not quite “see” at all. Edward Weston, aware of photography’s revelatory power of apperception, famously called this “seeing plus,” noting that “photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see […] Our vision is binocular, it is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures but a single isolated condition of the moment.”34 Historian Joel Snyder takes this idea even further and reminds us that while photographs may seem “unequivocally realistic,” they hardly “picture vision.” Despite almost two centuries of critical reflection about the ontology of the photographic image, much of which lays claim to the photograph’s indexical connection to the real (the idea that a photograph constitutes an imprint or authentic trace of its subject, an emanation of its referent, a certificate of presence, or a chemically produced analogue of a recognizable world), photographic optics differ considerably from the biological mechanisms that enable human beings to see.35 Photographs do not replicate sight. As Snyder notes, our vision is not constrained within a rectangular frame, it is boundless. What we see is distinct only at its center, “because our eyes foveate,” while a camera’s vision has the capacity to stop motion and delineate everything sharply across the plane. Humans perceive 33 Michel Chaillou, La France fugitive (Paris: Fayard, 1998), cover copy. 34 From a 1932 entry in Weston’s journal, which he kept for over a decade and would later come to be known as the “Daybooks.” Quoted in Wells, Land Matters, 9. 35 Readers familiar with the indexical approach to photographic ontology will surely recognize here expressions that resonate with work by widely read theorists of visual culture like Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Rosalind Krauss, Philippe Dubois, Rudolph Arnheim, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag, among others. For a synthetic history of photographic theory’s penchant for indexicality, see André Gunthert, “Une illusion essentielle. La photographie saisie par la théorie,” Études photographiques 34 (Spring 2016), http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesphotographiques/3592.

Introduction

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the world in color, not in black and white. And even the most unadulterated, unfiltered palette reproduced in a photograph, whether printed on paper or pixelated on screen, is less natural than the colors we discern with our eyes. Photographs can render generous depth of field in sharp focus, from near to far. And cameras can also be called upon to blur, scumble, or obscure a vision of the real, whether the subject is static or in motion. “We do not—because we cannot—see this way.”36 Both Weston and Snyder, in their critique of photography’s alleged affinity with sight, intimate that the abundance of visual information afforded by photographs, owing to photography’s mechanical vision, is not simply an alternative and sometimes heightened form of perception. Indeed, since the invention of the medium in the mid-nineteenth century, theorists and critics have suggested that photographs are capable of other feats as well. Photographs show and suggest, they connote as much as they denote, and they affect us in ways that defy description. If photographs help us make sense of things, they also open themselves to analysis and dissenting interpretations. They memorialize events and help viewers recall time past. Photographs occasionally influence our behavior. They trigger our emotions, encourage flights of fancy, and stimulate our thoughts, often in ways that resist logical explanation. Photographs “think” as much as we think about and through them, and they sometimes invite us to consider the reflexive properties of the medium itself. If we are to believe one theorist’s provocative claim, photographs often call out to viewers and express a form of desire; another asks what photographs “want.”37 Photography is “rhetorical,”38 replete with a set of aesthetic and visual codes that allow for subjective expression in the way that human seeing does not. It is perhaps thanks to these traits, among others, that photography occupies a special place in the history of art and representation, having been appropriated by disciplines like anthropology, psychology, and the history of science. For over a century and a half, photographs have been an essential vector through which to examine the world. 36 Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6:3 (Spring 1980), 505–6. Snyder dismantles the “camera-eye analogy” elsewhere in his work. See, notably, an essay co-written with Neal Walsh Allen, “Photography, Vision, Representation,” Critical Inquiry 2:1 (Autumn 1975), 143–69. 37 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 38 Wells, Land Matters, 9.

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This book examines a constellation of photographs and photographic series that do many of these things, and more. First and foremost, however, they represent a diversity of locales from all corners of France and acquaint us with local conditions on the ground. I would like to suggest that these photographs thus constitute an extensive though necessarily non-exhaustive état des lieux, literally a “state of place,” which is to say a visual inspection and appraisal, of France writ large. They take stock of such a wide variety of places that are often accessible and visible to the naked eye but which remain, for the most part, inconspicuous and disregarded, not so much “non-places”39 as sites not usually seen. The collective power of these pictures, then, lies in their ability to give “a glimpse of the character of the land that would otherwise require long experience to achieve.”40 Which is to say that they encourage a way of seeing and a sensation of knowing and feeling France near the end of the last century and into the first few decades of the twenty-first. At the same time, this corpus also represents an état des lieux, in the sense of an assessment, of the state of the art of contemporary French photography since the 1980s, a period marked by a renewed interest in the French landscape. As we shall see, the commitment to representing place in pictures has established this genre of photography’s reputation in France as much as it has fashioned new ways of thinking about the state of place of the French territoire today.

39 Marc Augé, Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Seuil, 1992). Some of the places photographed by artists I discuss in this book might be called “non-places” if we expand the original understanding of that term, as Jim Brogdon does, and consider them not as spaces devoid of identity through which people transit (which is Augé’s focus), but rather as “pockets of abandoned land which are rarely visited,” or “transitional areas of land situated in the urban landscape that are viewed as interstitial—without a clear function or meaning.” See Brogdon, Photography and the Non-Place: The Cultural Erasure of the City (New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 2. Like many of the photographers studied here, Brogdon’s own photographic practice rejects the way hegemonic culture has traditionally turned a blind eye to these sorts of sites, undervalued because they are “incidental.” 40 Neil Evernden, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 100.

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The Topographic Turn From its very inception, French photography has scrutinized vernacular landscapes. What many consider to be the first photograph made in France—what its inventor named a “heliograph”—was a view of a most matter-of-fact place. Produced around 1827, after almost a decade of experimentation, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s glimpse over the rooftops of his farm near Chalon-sur-Saône, made from the inside looking out, perceives this most domestic of topographies as a daydreaming child might, marveling at the world before her eyes.41 Niépce’s innovation, a fixed positive image made on a light-sensitive pewter plate, depicts, however faintly, a view from within a camera made with a camera obscura. It thus places the gesture of looking through the frame en abyme and performs one of the world’s first photographic acts that culminates in a picture whose subject is everyday space.42 While Niépce would eventually abandon photography in favor of research and development of other innovations, the vision established in the view from his estate at Le Gras, a vision that may seem like a “literal transcription” of the real but which involved making decisions at the point of composition that in fact “imposes an interpretation of the real,”43 set the stage for the birth of a topographic imaginary in France that would evolve over the next two centuries. Though, as one critic has remarked, “photography has had a love affair with landscape from 41 I refer here to Nicéphore Niépce’s “View from the Window at Le Gras,” considered by many to be the world’s first photograph. Looking out from a window on the second floor of the photographer’s estate in Burgundy, this relatively tiny (16.5 x 20.5 cm) positive image—preserved on a chemically treated pewter plate and housed in an oxygen-proof case at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas—represents various structures of his home in the foreground and a tree and the landscape beyond in the background. As the image is notoriously dim and difficult to see, scholars and enthusiasts mostly refer to an enhanced version readily available in textbooks and online. See Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 71 and 123. 42 For more on the spatial origins of photography, and on the relationship between landscape and the invention of the medium, see Robin Kelsey, “Is Landscape Photography?” in Is Landscape …?, ed. Charles Waldheim and Gareth Doherty (New York: Routledge, 2015), 71–92. 43 See Françoise Heilbrun, “The Landscape in Nineteenth-Century French Photography,” in A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape, ed. Richard Brettell and Scott Schaefer (Los Angeles, CA and New York: LACMA/ Harry Abrams, 1984), 349.

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its conception,”44 in France the relationship has ebbed and flowed over time. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several artists stand out for having produced topographic visions of the territory that remain influential to this day: from the five photographers selected to participate in the Mission héliographique of 1851, which produced a visual record of France’s decaying architectural patrimony, much of it consciously situated within the surrounding landscape,45 and Charles Marville’s documentation of the modernization of Paris during the Second Empire, to Eugène Cuvelier’s intimate portraits of trees and rock outcroppings in the Fontainebleau forest, Félix Thiollier’s images of industrial sites located in and around his hometown of Saint-Étienne, and Gustave Le Gray’s melancholic seascapes taken in Normandy and on the Mediterranean coast. For a little over 30 years, from the late 1880s through to the 1920s, Eugène Atget created an archive of over 10,000 large-plate negatives of locales in and around Paris. A mix of architectural photographs and urban townscapes in which people figured only occasionally, like in his iconic mise-en-scène of ragpickers and prostitutes, Atget’s comprehensive portrait of Paris and its environs set the standard for future photographic surveys of the city.46 Later, during the heyday of humanist photography in France during the decades preceding and immediately following the Second World War, ordinary places were often pictured with great intention by photographers like Willy Ronis, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, and, of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson. However, no matter how grounded in place the work of these mid-century photographers may seem, much modernist photography from France positioned place as a background onto which artists would project a story about the ways human beings live. It is perhaps because of this legacy, by which places in and of themselves are denied the status of a viable subject of the artist’s regard, that, for critics like Liz Wells and Jean-François Chevrier, visions of vernacular landscapes were never quite elevated 44 Rod Giblett, “Preface,” in Giblett and Juha Tolonen, Photography and Landscape (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2012), 15. 45 As Françoise Heilbrun notes, participants in the mission made a point of photographing uninspiring buildings within the landscape. See Heilbrun, “The Landscape in Nineteenth-Century French Photography,” 351. For more on the history and rediscovery (near the end of the 1970s) of the Mission héliographique, see Anne de Mondenard, La Mission héliographique. Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851 (Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 2002). 46 For a concise survey of Atget’s work and impact see Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

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to the status of a legitimate genre for modern French photography.47 Historian Gilles Mora, eliding the earlier contributions of nineteenthcentury artists like Marville, Le Gray, or Atget (and of historians like Françoise Heilbrun), remarked that landscape photography was “hardly a French tradition […] Photographing the landscape has never been an important practice.”48 Similarly, echoing Mora’s observation, Bernard Latarjet has said that, “in France, landscape was never a subject: it was a setting, the decor for human situation.”49 Hardly a motif for serious art photography, according to these critics, for much of the modern period pictures that foregrounded French places and the diversity of France’s built and natural environments remained the purview of picture postcards and illustrated travel guides that constructed a nostalgically idealized and altogether misleading image of the national territory. For Jean-François Chevrier, the stakes of this kind of proliferation are high. The swallowing up of the real by these kinds of mass-produced and tired “clichés” amounts to nothing less than the petrification, and the destruction, of our experience of the world.50 The new place-bound form of contemporary art photography that begins to emerge in the 1980s, and which continues to flourish in the twenty-first century, rejects the myopic, idealized, and mythological figuration of the French territoire that Chevrier so abhors. As one might expect, this new way of picturing place does not occur in a vacuum. It comes about, rather, within the larger context of a complex 47 As Liz Wells notes, landscape had for centuries been considered a “minor genre” within the larger field of European art, associated more with setting than subject. See Wells, Land Matters, 25–8. Writing in 1985, in a short essay on the genre of landscape photography, art historian François Chevrier said much the same thing when he noted that “modern art rarely concerned itself with the photographic representation of the environment.” Chevrier, “Qu’est-ce qu’un paysage?”, Art Press 91 (April 1985), 27. 48 Gilles Mora, qtd. in cover copy, Bernard Plossu, 101 éloges du paysage français (Paris: Silvana, 2010). Mora had likely not read Heilbrun’s survey of the prevalence of French landscape photography during the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Heilbrun, “The Landscape in Nineteenth-Century French Photography.” 49 Bernard Latarjet, interview with Danièle Méaux, in La France en albums, 19e–21e siècles, ed. Philippe Antoine, Danièle Méaux, and Jean-Pierre Montier (Paris: Hermann, 2017), 271. 50 See Chevrier, “Qu’est-ce qu’un paysage?” 27. For a useful unpacking of the etymology of the term “cliché,” see Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860–1970 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 9.

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set of cultural and historical phenomena that have worked to elevate the status of landscape as a worthwhile object of critical and artistic inquiry. Perhaps not surprisingly, these phenomena coincide with what scholars in the late 1980s began to call the emergence, in the 1960s and 1970s, of a “spatial” or “geographic” turn in the humanities and social sciences.51 The topographic turn in contemporary French photography epitomized by the corpus of artists that I explore in the chapters to follow can also be considered part of a larger trend in contemporary French culture in which artists of all stripes, including poets, novelists, theorists, essayists, and filmmakers, for example, have manifested a similar interest in landscape, in space and place, and in the ways people make meaning from the local and national territories in which they live.52 That said, the most significant event to stimulate the first major wave of place-based photography in post-war France first took root 51 Edward Soja was among the first to chart the trajectory of critical theory’s spatial turn in his seminal study Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989). Ten years later, in France, geographer Jacques Lévy coined the term “the geographical turn.” See Le Tournant géographique. Penser l’espace pour lire le monde (Paris: Belin, 1999). For a useful summary of various manifestations of these critical turns in fields such as philosophy, history, geography, literary criticism, and the arts, see Michel Collot, Pour une géographie littéraire (Paris: Corti, 2014), 15–37. 52 Scholarly work on the various manifestations of the topographic turn in contemporary French culture has proliferated of late. See, among other examples, État des lieux des récits français et francophones des années 1980 à nos jours, ed. Jean-Yves Laurichesse and Sylvie Vignes (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018); Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018); and Joshua Armstrong, Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). One might also cite here Adelaide Russo and Stéphane Harel’s volume L’énonciation des lieux/Le Lieux de l’énonciation dans les contextes francophones interculturels (Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2005); Pierre Schoentjes, Ce qui a lieu. Essai d’écopoétique (Marseille: Éditions Wildproject, 2015); and Verena Conley’s study of French theory’s spatial turn, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). For a survey of the development of critical approaches to space, place, landscape, and nature in French Studies more generally, see Rachel Bouvet and Stephanie Posthumus, “Ecoand Geo-Approaches in French and Francophone Literary Studies,” in Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed. Hubert Zapf (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2016), 385–412.

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in more unlikely terrain, namely in the inner workings of the French state. In the early 1980s a government agency initially created in 1963 under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and charged with managing policy related to regional planning, what the French call aménagement du territoire,53 began to rethink the nation’s relationship to the places its citizens inhabit. In 1983, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the agency’s founding, senior administrators from the DATAR, or the Inter-Ministerial Delegation for Territorial Management and Regional Action, decided that it was time to take stock and assess the profusion of profound alterations made to the French landscape since the end of the Second World War. This period, which encompasses the thirty or so “glorious”54 years of economic expansion from the Liberation until the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, was marked by the implementation of a nationwide politics of development as France turned inward in the face of decolonization. During this time, metropolitan France witnessed the birth of new industries, the erection of important new infrastructure projects, the creation of “new towns,” the rising popularity of new forms of mass commerce, and the construction of modern transportation networks designed to encourage the flow of people, products, and ideas between Paris and what had come to be known as the comparatively underdeveloped “French desert.”55 Much of this work was designed to close the social, 53 Venus Bivar notes an important nuance in the term aménagement du territoire, which “is literally translated as territorial management, and somewhat approximates the English-language regional planning, but in the French case is scaled up to extend to the entire nation […] In a nutshell, l’aménagement du territoire was designed to pursue the complete rationalization of the French landscape.” See Bivar, “Manufacturing a Multifunctional Countryside: Operational Landscapes, Urban Desire, and the French State, 1945–1976,” French Politics, Culture & Society 36:2 (Summer 2018), 58. 54 The term “les trente glorieuses” was made famous by the 1979 publication of demographer Jean Fourastié’s book, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). 55 While French history includes periods of extensive building and grands travaux—see, for example, Marc Desportes’s work on railway construction in the nineteenth century in his Paysages en mouvement. Perception de l’espace et transports (XVIIIe–XXe siècle) (Paris: Gallimard, 2005)—a cohesive policy of regional development does not truly begin to take shape until after the Liberation. Historians mark the first acknowledgment of France’s need for major investment with the 1947 publication of Jean-François Gravier’s important book, Paris et le désert français. See Sara B. Pritchard, “‘Paris et le désert français’: Urban

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economic, and cultural gaps that distinguished the thriving metropole from the neglected provinces. At the same time, the scale of these changes, made possible by an increasingly centralized political system run by a corps of technocrats bent on unleashing the potential of a more efficiently organized and interconnected national territory, left many of France’s inhabitants reeling from the consequences. As François Dagonet suggested in 1982, one troubling outcome of decades’ worth of nationwide aménagement was the ostensible “death” of landscape: “industrial society never ceases to deprive us of ‘resources’ that were thought to be inexhaustible, natural, or ubiquitous […] Industrialization devastates, corrodes, monopolizes.”56 Making matters more complicated, the pace of change over such a compressed period left little room for an assessment of the impact of these changes. In 1983, DATAR administrators recognized an urgent need to reflect on the agency’s accomplishments, to account for its failings, and to plan seriously for a sustainable path forward. At the same time, members of the delegation were also under pressure to support a new political imperative, lauded by the Socialist government elected to power in 1981 and devised by President François Mitterrand’s first appointee as Minister of Culture and Communication, Jack Lang, to make the arts once again central to the mission of the state. And thus the Mission photographique de la DATAR was born. The brainchild of photographer François Hers and DATAR delegate Bernard Latarjet, the mission brought together a select group of 29 artists—men and women, from up-and-coming auteurs to confirmed art photographers, the majority of them French, and two of them working together as a team—and dispatched them far and wide with the imperative to bring photography to bear on “the state of landscapes, of places where we live and work in France in the 1980s.”57 The aim was to render more legible and starkly visible the immense transformations that large-scale aménagement had wrought on the landscape over the preceding decades and Rural Environments in Post-World War II France,” in The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, Urban Space, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 175–91. 56 François Dagonet, “Philosophie du paysage,” in La Mort du paysage? Philosophie et esthétique du paysage (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1982), 7. 57 François Hers and Bernard Latarjet, “L’expérience du paysage,” in Paysages/ Photographies. La Mission photographique de la DATAR, travaux en cours 1984–1985 (Paris: Hazan, 1985), 27.

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so that citizens and technocrats alike could better apprehend the changing face of France’s physiognomy.58 With the mission’s organizers, the collective of photographers commissioned for the project selected regions within which to work and were given creative leeway to construct an image of their chosen territory as they saw fit. Over a period of four years, artists from different backgrounds, each with their own aesthetic sensibility, worked assiduously across the Hexagon, covering ground in Marseille (Holger Trülzsch) and by the English Channel (Gabriele Basilico), on industrial sites in Lorraine (Suzanne Lafont) and farmland in the southwest (Pierre de Fenoÿl), in the Paris suburbs (Robert Doisneau) and along train lines in the Alps (Sophie Ristelhueber). Collectively, from 36 projects, they produced an archive of views containing some 16,000 contact sheets and an official collection of almost 2,000 images, some of which were exhibited locally and published in two volumes, one in 1985 and the other in 1989. The photographic mission allowed one of the French state’s most consequential planning arms to show off its achievements and acknowledge its shortcomings, all the while suggesting how photography—subjective photographic series produced by artists working on the ground, as opposed to the more objective and scientific forms of aerial and satellite photography that became popular in planning circles during this same period—could impact policymaking decisions in the future.59 The organizers of the Mission photographique de la DATAR sought to mark a major turning point in the way French culture conceived of 58 For more on the origins of the DATAR mission, see, especially, Raphaële Bertho, La Mission photographique de la DATAR. Un laboratoire du paysage contemporain (Paris: La Documentation française, 2013). For a useful assessment of the impact of the mission on perceptions of the French countryside, see Sarah Farmer, Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 98–104. 59 For more on the political imperatives of the DATAR mission, see Odile Marcel, “Un legs monumental. Les pouvoirs de l’image photographique,” in La Mission photographique de la DATAR. Nouvelles perspectives critiques (Paris: Direction de l’information légale et administrative, 2014), 21–38; and Edward Welch, “Angels of History: Looking Back on Spatial Planning in the Mission photographique de la DATAR,” in France in Flux: Space, Territory and Contemporary Culture, ed. Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 186–215. For an analysis of aerial photography from the period, see Jean-Louis Cohen, Above Paris: The Aerial Survey of Roger Henrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

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its national territory. Hers and Latarjet put their faith in photography as a medium capable of ushering in a new culture of the landscape. They founded the DATAR mission to promote the idea that landscape should be thought of as a crucial cultural resource.60 Seemingly in response to Alain Roger’s observation that, even well into the 1990s, French citizens had yet to learn how to look at most new features of the modern landscape—“We do not yet know how to see our industrial complex, our futurist cities, the impact of a highway”61—the DATAR mission sought to impress upon the French citizenry how knowing who you are means first knowing where you live. If the mission’s organizers were keen on countering a more emblematic vision of the national territory, they were equally motivated by a desire to revisit the place of landscape within the field of contemporary French photography.62 Compared to the United States, which since the advent 60 See Bernard Debarbieux, “Territorialités étatiques et politiques d’enregistrement,” in La Mission photographique de la DATAR. Nouvelles perspectives critiques (Paris: Direction de l’information légale et administrative, 2014), 48. 61 Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 113. 62 If the photographs and photographic series I examine in this book are all indebted in one way or another to the DATAR mission (two of the artists I discuss in later chapters, Thibaut Cuisset and Raymond Depardon, were participants), its organizers were themselves informed by a long tradition of landscape photography in the United States. Work like the U.S. Geological surveys of the American West during the 1860s and 1870s, the Farm Security Administration project documenting the effects of poverty on rural areas during the Great Depression, and, perhaps most importantly, the 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY all contributed to the design of the DATAR’s own “survey” of post-war France as much as it did to the more recent trend of topographic landscape photography in contemporary France that I chart in the pages that follow. Frédéric Pousin, however, has argued that the DATAR organizers’ indebtedness to earlier missions like the Mission héliographique and the Farm Security Administration survey are misleading since they do not consider the French specificity of the project, its focus on a territory and landscape “in crisis,” and the way it self-consciously interrogates the place of landscape in the history of art and photography, and in French culture more generally. See Pousin, “Photographie, projet de paysage et culture professionnelle,” in La Mission photographique de la DATAR. Nouvelles perspectives critiques (Paris: Direction de l’information légale et administrative, 2014), 114. Michel Poivert notes another common critical blind spot: namely, the series of tableaux of suburban construction sites that French art photographer Jean-Marc Bustamente made around Barcelona beginning in 1978. See Poivert, “La Mission photographique. Paysage de la photographie contemporaine,” in La

Introduction

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of the medium has cultivated an important tradition of place-based photography—from the famous geological and geographical surveys of the 1860s and 1870s to the “New Topographics” exhibition at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY in 1975, both of which served as explicit points of reference for Hers and Latarjet—for the DATAR mission’s organizers, landscape could no longer be considered a major genre in French photography “after the 1920s” (with, one might deduce, the death of Atget in 1927). Photographers participating in the DATAR’s mission, unable to lean on any “living tradition” of contemporary landscape photography, were compelled and indeed encouraged to break new ground.63 Hers and Latarjet understood from the outset the impact their work would have on the discipline, and how it could potentially serve as a major turning point in the history of the medium in France. Not simply because the Mission photographique constituted one of the largest public commissions of photography in France’s history, armed as the organizers were with a budget of 3.5 million francs (the equivalent to just over 1 million euros today). But also because it signaled a major shift in aesthetic focus. Historian Michel Poivert has noted that as French photography matured during the twentieth century, it was marked by three major trends that afforded a number of artists international recognition: namely, a lyrical brand of social realist, humanist photography that rose to prominence between the two world wars and which was driven by an appeal to the emotions and Cartier-Bresson’s aesthetic of the “decisive moment”; the new mode of photojournalism that accompanied the creation, in the 1960s, of photographic agencies like Magnum, Gamma, and Viva, and which ascribed auteur status to artists in the post-war years; and, finally, what critic Dominique Bacqué famously called “la photographie plasticienne,” a more conceptual style of picture making that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s and stood out in its hybridization of painterly, theatrical, and cinematic tendencies. As Poivert suggests, the photographic mission of the DATAR can be considered a historical watershed that ushers in a fourth major trend, a new “photographic territory” that defines a burgeoning era.64 To the extent that it gave Mission photographique de la DATAR. Nouvelles perspectives critiques (Paris: Direction de l’information légale et administrative, 2014), 72. 63 Hers and Latarjet, “L’expérience du paysage,”36. 64 Poivert, “La Mission photographique,” 70.

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institutional legitimacy to a rhetoric of neutrality that would inform representations of the French landscape over the next several decades, the Mission photographique enabled art photographers to see themselves as distinct both from their conceptualist contemporaries and from an earlier generation of photographers for whom sentiment, embellishment, and the truth of the moment were paramount. The flourishing production of contemporary landscape photography in France in the decades since the DATAR mission has been bolstered by a surge of academic and institutional interest in the history and current state of the genre in France. A critical mass of scholars have turned their attention to photographic representations of French places. Seminal work by historians and practitioners has begun to appear.65 New publication venues like Paysageur (“a journal that thinks with its feet on the ground”) have launched. And well-known critics and curators have, in books, conferences, and articles, championed works that embody the topographic turn.66 At the same time, a series of exhibits has allowed for large-scale, public dissemination of the new topographic photography from France.67 Perhaps most importantly, October 2017 saw the opening of “Paysages français. Une aventure photographique, 1984–2017,” a major exhibition at the French National Library in Paris of more than 1,000 images by 160 photographers that included, for the first time, a selection of work by all 29 participants of the Mission photographique de la DATAR as well as presentations of other photographic missions and a survey of trends in contemporary landscape photography. If attending to place in 65 See, for example, Bertho, La Mission photographique de la DATAR; Danièle Méaux, Géo-photographies: Une approche renouvelée des territoires (Trézélan: Filigranes, 2015); and Photopaysage: Débattre du projet de paysage par la photographie, ed. Frédéric Pousin (Paris: Les Productions du Effa, 2018). One might also add to this list a volume of interviews that adopt philosopher Monique Sicard’s genetic approach to photographic studies, which is to say her interest in unearthing the material conditions of landscape photography’s production, in La Fabrique photographique des paysages, ed. Sicard, Aurèle Crasson, and Gabrielle Andries (Paris: Hermann, 2017). 66 See, for example, Christine Ollier, Paysage Cosa Mentale (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2013). 67 To take just one example, the 2017 iteration of the annual global photography festival in Arles featured an entire thematic sequence called “L’expérience du territoire” that included an exhibit of work by 15 of the DATAR’s original 29 artists.

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contemporary French photography does not form a definitive school or a movement, “Paysages français” broadcast how this practice nevertheless constitutes a dominant, if not the predominant, tendency.68 State of Place, State of Mind Building on the foundation of the DATAR mission, the photographs and photographic series under consideration in the chapters to follow constitute a visual lesson about the diverse physiognomy of the nation’s landscapes and are rife with information that has rich “geo-photographic”69 potential. But they also provide viewers with more than superficial details or analyzable data about a place. From views of parking lots, prairies, and the soft curves of remote country roads to those that invite us to ponder the geometric shapes that emerge from welded beams of steel in a Parisian building site or from a tangle of trees in the forest. And from visions melding textures of gravel, wild grasses, cracked tarmac, resilient plants, and sediment that crop up throughout France’s suburban yet defiantly wild “edgelands” and “unofficial countryside”70 to those that show indeterminate and unproductive empty lots or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, photographic depictions of common places promote a way of seeing that resists the kind of romantic, authorized, and iconographic ideal of the French territory embodied in classic scholastic manuals like G. Bruno’s Le Tour de France par deux enfants from 1877 and the maps of France on old railway trains, or in prototypical picture postcards, glossy holiday brochures, and guidebooks for tourists that typify what art historian Jean-François Chevrier once called the mask of the “charming landscape.”71 Instead, the kind of topographic landscape 68 An extensive catalogue was published to mark the exhibition’s opening. See Raphaële Bertho and Héloïse Conésa, eds, Paysages français. Une aventure photographique, 1984–2017 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2017). 69 See Méaux, Géo-photographies. 70 See Marion Shoard, “Edgelands,” in Remaking the Landscape, ed. Jennifer Jenkins (London: Profile Books, 2002), 117–46; Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (London: Vintage, 2012); and Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside (London: Collins, 1973). 71 Chevrier, “Qu’est-ce qu’un paysage?”, 27. Raphaële Bertho notes how the photographic postcard played a dominant role in consecrating a glorified image of the French countryside for much of the post-war period, until the DATAR

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photography examined here suggests how more humble places can be mobilized to “picture the nation” in a different and perhaps even more genuine way than those scenic and symbolically charged heritage sites—the “storied ground” of the Mont Blanc, the châteaux of the Loire Valley, or the cliffs at Étretat, to name just a few—that mythologize the singularity of France and French culture and create an idealized sense of national community.72 It is in this way that the photographic état des lieux that I chart in this book does not establish a consensual image of how France appears, but instead works to resist the aesthetic and institutional forces that normalize it. I would go on to argue that the topographic conditions that have become so visible in French photography are equally indicative of a state of mind, or what the French call an état d’âme. Topographic photographs that adopt a forensic way of seeing pay attention to detail in a way that gives visual form to what critic James Wood calls literature’s capacity for “serious noticing.”73 Which is to say that they offer viewers the opportunity for a sustained inspection and appraisal of the nuances of the world. But the kind of serious noticing that these photographs encourage also presents opportunities for introspection, for taking stock, and for the cultivation of a sense of awareness about where things stand.74 mission broke with that tradition. See Bertho, La Mission photographique de la DATAR, 116. For more on the way tourist guidebooks propagated expected images and clichéd descriptions of the nation’s most iconic sites, see David Martens and Anne Reverseau, eds, Pays de papier. Les livres de voyage (Charleroi: Musée de la photographie, 2019). 72 For more on the ways representation of landscape “pictures the nation,” see Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5. François Walter also provides a broad account of how landscape contributes to a greater sense of national belonging and community in his Les Figures paysagères de la nation. Territoire et paysage en Europe (xvi–xx siècles) (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2004). I borrow the notion of “storied ground” from historian Paul Readman’s work on the role that a diverse array of landscapes, both canonical and mundane, have to play in the formation of national identity. See Readman, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 73 James Wood, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays (New York: Vintage, 2019). 74 Indeed, as geographer Peirce K. Lewis writes, “the culture of any nation is unintentionally reflected in its ordinary vernacular landscape.” Lewis, “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene,” in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays: Geographical

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The new brand of topographic photography that emerged in France in the mid-1980s and continues to flourish in the early twenty-first century represents a visual laboratory through which to observe the diversity of France’s landscapes and investigate what they mean in the context of contemporary French culture. More specifically, the images and photographic series I consider in the chapters to follow identify places in France—and not without some mild unease and uncertainty, as the idiom état d’âme subtly implies—as privileged loci within and through which converge conversations about capital and class; cities and their peripheries; the politics and diverse impacts of development; migration and borders; memory, history, and affect; empire and colonialism; national identity; and the changing environment. The Topographic Imaginary thus contends that attending to place in contemporary French photography provides insight into the disposition of a nation in flux. Looking at photographs of Parisian construction (and destruction) sites by artists Marc Petitjean and Stéphane Couturier, the first chapter proposes that pictures of urban landscapes in various stages of mutation depict the city not merely as a bounded physical reality, but as a dialectical process, constantly shifting between chaos and order. Both Petitjean’s series on the evolution of the neighborhood surrounding the Centre Pompidou and Couturier’s views of the innards of nearby buildings in his Urban Archaeology series bear witness to the processes of an architectonic form of creative destruction in Paris’s city center. As they elicit the past, present, and future life of the buildings they picture, their images consider how the production and use of space factors into the larger historical processes of Paris’s becoming. When examined closely and in tandem, however, Petitjean’s and Couturier’s photographs also hint at the logic of speculation, in both the visual and commercial sense of that term, that subtends their production, dissemination, and display. In doing so, both projects study the construction site as part of a strategy to lay bare what the rhythms of modernization and capitalism often obscure and leave behind. Chapter Two takes readers to the city limits, and then extra muros into the urban fringe, and considers a corpus of photographic representations of the outskirts, most notably in the zones and banlieues that surround France’s capital. Here I explore a cluster of photographers like Patrick Tourneboeuf, Mathieu Pernot, and Camille Fallet, among others, whose Essays, edited by D.W. Meinig (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 15.

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work orbits around the capital city’s atmosphere and seeks to recalibrate the way we see what Victor Hugo once called the “bastard countryside”75 of the suburbs. These views, considered within the context of what I call mainstream French culture’s flawed “peripheral vision,” make some of the most vernacular, marginal, and comparatively unseen sites around Paris’s iconic central core more conspicuous. In doing so, they render the peri-urban periphery more intelligible to a public that neither inhabits nor frequents these places and which has been conditioned to see them as a cliché. Chapter Three delves into the archive of collective photographic ventures designed and supported by various institutions to document and appraise the evolution of modern French space. Resonating with groundbreaking government-backed commissions like the Mission héliographique of 1851 and the Mission photographique de la DATAR mentioned above, the chapter focuses on two more recent group projects: the ongoing, state-sponsored Observatoire photographique du paysage, inaugurated in 1991, and the more proteiform France(s) territoire liquide project that ran from 2011 to 2014. I argue that both missions brought together a team of artists who, each in their own way, visualizes what historian Stéphane Gerson calls the “infranational territory” of France— its small towns and borderlands, from regional parks and parking lots to out-of-the way places and seemingly insignificant spaces—to explore how these local landscapes have adjusted to commercial and industrial development and disruption, migration and immigration, and ecological change. Chapter Four examines work by Thierry Girard and Thibaut Cuisset, two photographers from the same generation whose work is especially illustrative of contemporary French photography’s penchant for exploring what writer Georges Picard calls the “interstices of the real” that, for various reasons, give each artist pause.76 Seeking to reveal the qualities of French places that are often obscured, at the limit of the visible, Girard and Cuisset make photographs that immerse viewers deeply in the landscape. While they differ significantly in approach and aesthetic, both artists look beyond the material and posit the latent intelligence and sensuous potential that animate and enliven the seemingly static landscapes that they picture across the French countryside. While Girard’s 2012 series Paysages insoumis identifies sites 75 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 595. 76 Georges Picard, Le Vagabond approximatif (Paris: Corti, 2001), 15–16.

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in some of central France’s least populous regions as caches of memory and history, Cuisset’s “campagnes photographiques” (“campagne” in the sense of both countryside and artistic campaign) investigate how landscape elicits the photographer’s non-cognitive responses to what theorists have called the subtle “intensities” and “miniscule events”77 that quiver throughout and from within the places he encounters. Picturing these excentric topographies in these two distinct though not mutually exclusive ways provides a novel alternative to iconic visions of French heritage, one that does not ascribe value to a site based on a national impulse to recognize and commemorate but, rather, derives meaning and value from local microhistories and “ordinary affects.”78 Finally, in the book’s last chapter, I examine celebrated filmmaker and photojournalist Raymond Depardon’s foray into the world of largeformat landscape photography in his important series, La France de Raymond Depardon. Depardon’s project revolves around an inherent tension opposing two distinct ways of seeing France. This tension, I argue, echoes a fractured politics in French society. For while the hundreds of photographs that Depardon made in and around villages and towns across the Hexagon between 2004 and 2010 might at first seem to project a conservative, nostalgic view of a sclerotic nation in decline and resistant to change, they in fact challenge this retrograde vision and hint, instead, at a more expansive, inclusive, and open approach that embraces what France has become and hints to where it is headed. In a brief coda to this book, I consider how photographers attend to places that were once officially part of France but are no longer. By way of example, I offer a reading of Thomas Jorion’s 2016 series, Vestiges d’empire. While Jorion’s work makes visible the architectural and infrastructural remnants of France’s imperial aspirations across Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean, his photographs suggest how the countless ruins of France’s transoceanic legacy elicit a spatially orchestrated form of trauma that continues to exert its force in the present. Jorion’s work thereby problematizes what we mean when we talk about “French” landscapes, positing the idea of the Hexagon and the very notion of the national territory as psychically loaded and limiting 77 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21. 78 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

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concepts. The Topographic Imaginary thus concludes by inviting further inquiry into contemporary photographic visions of landscapes not only in metropolitan France, but throughout the francophone postcolony and beyond. As I hope to show in this book, contemporary French photography offers scholars of French Studies, among others, a relatively untapped field of artifacts ripe for analysis. Especially when compared to more traditional objects of study that attract more regular critical attention, like works of literature and cinema, or even graphic novels. As the editors of one of the few English-language volumes devoted to recent French photography noted in 2014, our discipline’s approach to the medium has historically been shortsighted. As such, “inclusion of photography in the canon of subjects studied as part of French and francophone culture appears timely, and indeed overdue.”79 What follows is an attempt to address that assertion and plot a genre of pictures that attend so assiduously to French places more prominently on the disciplinary map.

79 Kathrin Yacavone, “Introduction: Mapping Photography in French and Francophone Cultures,” Nottingham French Studies 53:2 (Summer 2014), 117.

chapter one

Construction Sights Construction Sights

The passing of the buildings was for me a great event. —Danny Lyon1 We look intently at landscapes that we have created without seeing their internal foundations, the nerves, the bones, the viscera, the fluids. —Raymond Bozier2

Cities, and the neighborhoods that comprise them, exist in a state of inconstancy. A city is by nature a work in progress, an unremitting program, a testament to an ongoing process. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, cities are “formed like a project or like a set of infinite or indefinite indications.”3 Cities are born and live. Sometimes they enter a period of decline, or even die. And when they do, they are occasionally reborn in the seemingly never-ending cycle of creation and destruction that makes them such intriguing and dynamic places to inhabit, write about, and, especially, to photograph. If photography is an art of the instant, “always in the fleeting mode of the burst,” it is especially well suited for the city, which reveals itself in “fragments that resemble nothing other than a loose confederation, nominal and symbolic, always poorly identifiable in the reality of its tracks, its traffics, its stirrings.”4 1 Danny Lyon, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 2. 2 Raymond Bozier, Fenêtres sur le monde (Paris: Fayard, 2004), cover copy. 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, La Ville au loin (Paris: La Phocide, 2011), 6. 4 Nancy, La Ville au loin, 71–2.

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New York, to take an illustrative example, has experienced numerous life cycles, and has sustained transformations of all kinds, in the form of various bursts and stirrings, since Verrazano sailed through the narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island in 1524. To be sure, some of that city’s transformations have been particularly photogenic. Photographer Danny Lyon made a series of images of lower Manhattan in the late 1960s that chronicle a formidable period of change. His pictures, 72 of which were published in his 1969 photobook, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, illustrate an earlier iteration of the area around Wall Street, documenting the clearing of older structures to make way for the new. In doing so, the photographs give visible shape to an architectonic take on what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, writing in 1942, famously called “creative destruction,” the process by which the engine of capital, fueled by the production of new goods, new methods of production, and the discovery of new markets perpetually works to displace bygone structures in a revolutionary and “perennial gale” of adaptation and renovation.5 For Lyon, the passing, as he euphemistically called it, of outmoded buildings on Gold, John, and Pine streets, many as much as a century old, was a “great event.” While much of the first part of his photobook displays images that serve as useful establishing shots of the neighborhood, another section of pictures taken from inside an array of abandoned buildings reminds us that the increasingly popular though often illicit practice of urban exploration (“urbex”) is perhaps not as recent a trend as we might think. Lyon’s vision of the city is bound to give viewers pause, for it takes us back to a time when one could seemingly drift in and out of derelict buildings with relative ease. His black-andwhite photographs, memento mori all, record for posterity a defunct version of a place that is no more. Perhaps most importantly, as they register the clearing of almost 60 acres of land to make way for the World Trade Center site, they hint eerily at the ultimate disappearance of the twin towers, remembering the future of what would become two of late twentieth-century New York City’s most monumental buildings.6 The term monumental is apropos here, not simply because it refers to the towers’ enduring iconic significance, but because the 5 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2006), 84. 6 Lyon reissued the series in a new book published in 2005, several years after the attacks of 9/11/2001.

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derivation of the term can be traced back to the Middle English word for a burial place and further to the Latin monere, which means both to recall and to warn. The phenomenon that curator Joel Smith calls “the life and death of buildings”7 has been a longstanding subject of fascination for French photographers, too. Since the advent of the medium in the mid-nineteenth century, photographers in France have been observing modifications to the urban landscape, especially in Paris, training their lenses on the evolution of the neighborhoods these buildings occupy. While invented in the 1820s and 1830s, photography truly came into its own as a popular technology, and a form of art, a few decades later at a moment when the French capital began to embark on an ambitious new wave of urban development. The timing was serendipitous. The rapid advancement of the new medium allowed architects, planners, and administrators to call frequently on photographers to take stock of the city’s topographic evolution.8 From Charles Marville’s commission to document Paris before and after the city’s march toward modernity under Baron Eugène Haussmann during the Second Empire, and Edouard Baldus’s images of the new wing of the Louvre under construction from 1855 to 1865, to Louis-Émile Durandelle’s project charting the building, in the 1860s, of the Garnier Opera House (Durandelle would go on to photograph the construction of the Sacré-Cœur basilica and the Eiffel Tower), the early history of French photography attests to a preoccupation with mutations 7 Joel Smith, The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 8 For a useful discussion of some of these public commissions, see Anne de Mondenard, “Au XIXe siècle, des lieux pour construire de nouvelles images,” in Esthétique de la photographie de chantier, ed. François Soulages and Angèle Ferrere (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), 46–62. Patricia Limido reminds us that other cities like Bordeaux and Marseille also engaged photographers of the period to document architectural change and promote progressive urban policy. See Limido, “‘Le Chantier, c’est la vie’. Le chantier urbain entre pulsion de vie et pulsion de mort,” in Photographier le chantier. Transformation, mouvement, altération, désordre, ed. Jordi Balesta and Anne-Céline Callens (Paris: Hermann, 2019), 95–108. Topographic photography that traces the mutation of the built environment over time, and especially the construction of new buildings, was often employed to shape the public’s reception of these projects during the nineteenth century. Architects also commissioned photographers to help them with fundraising efforts. See Claude Baillargeon, “Construction Photography and the Rhetoric of Fundraising: The Maison Durandelle Sacré-Cœur Commission,” Visual Resources 27:2 (2011), 113–28.

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of the urban vernacular, and with the city as process, that Lyon’s images of New York, made 100 years later, make equally manifest. As this subgenre of urban photography attests, “The shape of a city changes more quickly, alas, than the human heart.” Charles Baudelaire’s apocalyptic lament, shocked as the great poet was by the staggering pace of change to the “Old Paris” that Marville, Baldus, and Durandelle record so clearly in their photographs, has proven to be as timeless as it has become universal.9 The indefinite project of the city’s perpetual becoming continues to this day. Contemporary French photography affirms a no less impassioned obsession with the ever-evolving urban landscape. In what follows, I explore the formal characteristics and symbolic valence of two series of urban photographs that survey the variable topographic contours of late twentieth-century Paris and, by doing so, take architecture and, no less importantly, real estate development as theme. While quite distinct in their approach, both series share an affinity for picturing the chantier, the site of a building’s construction, all while reminding us implicitly that French photography, since its inception, has depicted the collateral deconstruction of parts of the city, too. If photography and the city complement each other so well, their complementarity is especially discernible in the figure of the worksite. The chantier excavates a city’s most hidden and rarely seen recesses, revealing its secrets and suggesting something about its soul—not unlike, as Nancy writes, the way we might rub leaves of a plant together, or tear them up, to release their floral scent.10 Photographs of these seemingly omnipresent yet often neglected places “on the edges of the visible”11 are similarly evocative. Not least because pictures that attend so carefully to places and structures in various stages of passage and becoming are inherently dialectical. As they invoke at once the past, present, and future state of the sites they envision—hearkening back to views of Paris in the nineteenth century, but also looking forward to where the French capital may be headed as 9 Baudelaire’s famous adage, “la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel,” from his poem, “Le Cygne,” is published in the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du mal (1857). See Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1980), 63–4. 10 Nancy, La Ville au loin, 76. 11 François Soulages and Angèle Ferrere, “Introduction,” in Esthétique de la photographie de chantier (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), 6.

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it wades further into the twenty-first—these images invite spectators to reflect on photography’s and architecture’s inherent relationship to time. Both photographs and buildings act as repositories of memory; they are “at once the products, the vessels, and the cargo of history.”12 When examined collectively, and closely, the photographs also hint at the logic, the byproducts, and the casualties of speculation, in the optical and fiscal sense of that term, that subtend their production, dissemination, and display. Beaubourg Is Dead. Long Live Beaubourg! Between 1972 and 1994, photographer and video artist Marc Petitjean produced a series of almost 3,000 black-and-white photographs made in the area on and around the intersection where the rue Rambuteau meets the rue Beaubourg in central Paris’s third arrondissement, or district. A small selection of just over 100 of these photographs was published in a medium-format photobook, Métro Rambuteau, in 1997.13 The series, which resonates with the kind of work that Danny Lyon made of the changing face of lower Manhattan in the 1960s, depicts almost 30 years of change in an area known as the Beaubourg plateau. Petitjean’s images, shot in a traditional documentary style, track the most expansive moment of modernization in central Paris’s history since Haussmannization when, beginning 100 years after the end of the Second Empire, in the early 1970s, the heart of the city witnessed a total transformation marked by a few of its own “great events.”14 These included the demolition, 12 Smith, The Life and Death of Buildings, 14. 13 Marc Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau (Paris: Hazan/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). In 1980, Petitjean also directed a black-and-white documentary film, just under an hour long, that documents the transformation of the neighborhood and, through a series of interviews, gives voice to many of the locals that figure in his photographs. See Marc Petitjean, dir. Métro Rambuteau. Métro Productions, 1980. 14 As historian Jacob Paskins remarks, some Parisians were concerned that the redevelopment plan for the neighborhood, which included high-rise buildings, was going to turn this part of Paris into New York. See Paskins, Paris Under Construction: Building Sites and Urban Transformation in the 1960s (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 129. Paskins’s book also serves as a reminder that, while construction projects in the 1970s completely transformed the look and feel of a part of urban Paris’s most iconic central core, notably the area around Les

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starting in 1971, of architect Victor Baltard’s eponymous nineteenthcentury pavilions at Les Halles, home to the city’s central meat, fish, and produce markets and located just west of the Beaubourg plateau (the last remaining pavilion was moved for posterity to Nogent-sur-Marne in 1974, and is used for concerts and other events); the transfer of these markets from Les Halles to a state-of-the-art, ultra-sanitized facility 7 km south of city;15 the construction of an underground shopping center and massive subway and commuter rail station on the parcel formerly occupied, since the eleventh century, by the central markets; the razing of a pocket of “insalubrious” residential buildings, some of which dated back to the seventeenth century, in the neighborhood directly east of the central markets (a procedure that necessitated the displacement of the people who called those buildings home);16 and, of course, the construction of the Centre Georges Pompidou on an empty tract adjacent to the rue Beaubourg that had served for years as a makeshift parking lot for trucks delivering goods to the wholesalers in Les Halles. The Centre Pompidou, affectionately known as “Beaubourg,” was inaugurated in 1977. Petitjean’s pictures, some of them taken from the third-floor window of the artist’s family apartment in a typically Haussmannian building across the street from the Centre Pompidou site, make visible what he calls the “topographic confusion”17 felt by many Parisians during this historical period of change. Spanning 22 years, the images, when read

Halles, this new wave of urban renewal had started in earnest even earlier, in the 1960s, with the development of new transport infrastructure, residential and office buildings, and new universities around the city. As we will see in Chapter Two, the suburbs surrounding Paris (and other cities) also experienced great change, beginning in the 1950s, in the form of new public housing, schools, hospitals, roads, factories, and power stations. As Paskins notes, construction and civil engineering became the country’s largest industry during this period. See Paskins, Paris Under Construction, 1–3. 15 This, the world’s largest wholesale food market, is known colloquially by the name of the town where it is situated: Rungis. 16 As Rosemary Wakeman notes, the Beaubourg plateau, located in the area just north of the Hôtel de Ville, was considered one of the city’s most notorious “slums” as early as 1906. After the Second World War, rooting out districts like this “became an obsession of planners and architects whipping up visions of Paris arising from the ashes like a modern phoenix.” See Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris 1945–1958 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 47. 17 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 4.

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alongside the short texts the photographer wrote to accompany them, chart the gradual evolution of the neighborhood. They document the disappearance of buildings, streets, and a beloved local bistro, and trace the erection of modish new structures—like the buildings that comprise the residential Quartier de l’Horloge—in their place. Petitjean’s pictures also evoke the waning of a way of living and practicing the city to which inhabitants of this sector had, over time, become accustomed. Rather than falling into the trap of wistful lamentation, however, Petitjean’s images privilege a more clinical look at a common urban phenomenon. As he writes, “the goal was to tell a story, to follow people, to observe various buildings and objects over time. It was not a nostalgic enterprise, but rather an inquiry into the violence of a seemingly banal event that one could have encountered without ever even noticing.”18 Organized chronologically in six sections, the series invites viewers to ponder details that most pedestrians or denizens would very likely overlook. In a section documenting the last days of Au Rendez-vous des Routiers, a local café slated for demolition to make way for a new underground parking lot, several photographs reveal the remnants of a space that used to be dedicated to conviviality. Pots and pans in the kitchen line countertops caked with flour next to empty ramekins on a serving tray, a still life of a business whose activity seems to have been brought suddenly to a standstill. Other photographs take us down streets and alleys in the area around that building, now destroyed, where we catch a glance of daily life amidst the debris. Elsewhere, we see massive machinery, from cranes that proliferate on the horizon to dump drunks removing rubble. In one photograph that resonates with the “violence” perpetrated against the neighborhood that Petitjean observes, a driller that dominates the foreground is poised to mine another hole in an area where centuries-old buildings, like those aligned on the rue Saint-Martin in the background, once used to stand (Figure 1.1).19 Pictures made in 1974 invite viewers to marvel at the emergent exoskeleton of what remains one of Paris’s most radical architectural gestures as it slowly materializes in one of the city’s oldest districts (Figure 1.2). The book’s final sequences highlight the welcoming new square and guest entrance on the Centre Pompidou’s western flank, as well as the revamped 18 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 26. 19 This is not to be confused with that other famous, even bigger hole, the “trou des Halles,” that was being excavated just a few blocks away.

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commercial sector adjacent to it. Tourists come to visit on buses that line the rue Beaubourg, and locals abound, as life returns to make this neighborhood vibrant once again. Looking at these pictures, cynical viewers might construe the construction of the Centre Pompidou as a gesture of architectural insolence. The Centre’s designers, architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, made zero concessions to the surrounding environment. Critics of the building like the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard lambasted the project, equating the new neighborhood with the Centre at its center to a “machine for making emptiness.”20 But Petitjean’s pictures of the sector’s renaissance also encourage another way of seeing, reflecting instead Jean-Christophe Bailly’s thoughts on the favorable effects the Centre Pompidou had on the quartier. Despite its controversial design that contrasts so starkly with much of the area that surrounds it (the rue Saint-Martin just opposite the site was first worn into the ground during the Roman empire), Bailly reads the Centre’s construction as a salutary undertaking. While Métro Rambuteau’s earlier pictures chart a landscape of loss, Petitjean’s images of the area from the 1990s reveal a building that “inscribes itself into the city like something that should have been there all along,” installed into the body of late twentiethcentury Paris like a “pacemaker” designed to keep the city’s heart beating steadily for years to come.21 The title of Petitjean’s project, Métro Rambuteau, does not refer to the Centre Pompidou or to the site on which it was erected but to the sole entrance and exit to the subway station that ties the neighborhood to the larger transportation network that lies beneath. While buildings around it would disappear, the métro entrance served as a recognizable beacon during the decades of urban renewal that Petitjean’s project chronicles, one of the few features of the landscapes that emerged unscathed from the construction. Marked by its distinctive, interwar-style signpost, 20 Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 61. 21 Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Ville à l’œuvre (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Imprimeur, 2001), 140. Bailly attributes the metaphor of the pacemaker to poet Francis Ponge. Art and architecture critic André Fermigier, who famously condemned the renovation of Les Halles and the destruction of the Baltard pavilions just a few blocks away, also praised the “beautiful and big” Centre Pompidou, calling it “a kind of architectural King-Kong” that helped to accentuate and enliven the surrounding neighborhood. See Fermigier, La Bataille de Paris. Des Halles à la Pyramide, chroniques d’urbanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 317–18.

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wrought iron railing, and illuminated map of the city’s subway system, the entrance can be seen most notably in the photograph that graces the cover of Petitjean’s book (Figure 1.3). That it is dwarfed by the six stories of the Centre Pompidou in mid-construction rising to the top of the photograph’s frame (the picture was taken in 1975) is a fitting visual metaphor for the way major urban planning projects often uproot communities and disrupt daily life. The shot is taken in what seems to be late twilight, as the sun sets in the west, suggesting the end of an era (the older buildings in the northeast corner will soon disappear). At the same time, however, the presence here of the métro station also evokes how meaningful vernacular places can be. For the station—a stop on line 11, inaugurated in 1935, that remained opened during the neighborhood’s renovation—is an intricate part of this place’s identity. Virtually all of city’s 302 subway stations function in a similar way. As anthropologist Marc Augé famously suggested, the Parisian métro system is also an evocative aide-mémoire. For most native Parisians, long-term residents, and even regular visitors can identify certain times in their lives with the métro stations that they most frequented then. They often speak of successive “periods”: “I fell in love with my wife during my métro Picpus period,” say, or “I look back fondly on the time we lived near métro Saint-Sulpice when the children were young.” As Augé thoughtfully notes, the collective accumulation of these periods contributes to a subjective and “secret” geography of the city: “the métro map, a sentimental allegory, is like the palm of a hand that one has only to scrutinize to discover pathways connecting life lines to head lines to heart lines.”22 Considered in this context, the title of Petitjean’s series signals an important moment in the life cycle of the city itself, Paris’s “Rambuteau” period, a time when, for a few decades at the beginning of the Fifth Republic, it, too, like the lives of the people who lived there, was marked in profound ways by a series of momentous events. It is in this way that Petitjean’s series also resonates with, and even helps illustrate Walter Benjamin’s dialectical conception of history, a useful concept that we might invoke to think through photographs that, on their own or when considered collectively, bring together past and present, like communicating vessels, as Petitjean says, “with, on one hand, the birth of the Centre Georges Pompidou […] and, on the other, the gradual disappearance of castles made of stone and wood beams 22 Marc Augé, Un Ethnologue dans le métro (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 19.

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conceived and fabricated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: two civilizations that were intersecting before my eyes.”23 Not only do the photographs in Métro Rambuteau invite readers to reminisce, they bear witness again and again to a nexus of distinct eras colliding in a maelstrom of creative destruction. Like all photographs, though, they do so by projecting a vision of time momentarily come to a halt where, as Benjamin writes, the “relation of what-has-been to the now is […] not temporal in nature but pictorial.”24 This coming together of distinct temporalities within the image is perhaps most famously illustrated in Benjamin’s remarks on Paul Klee’s monoprint from 1920, Angelus Novus. In a famous ekphrasis from his essay “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin likens the subject of Klee’s painting to the “angel of history,” a figure he sees as driven irresistibly into the future by the winds of change all while facing backward toward the wreckage wrought by the forces of progress.25 Petitjean’s photographs channel this tension between the relentless onrush of time and what is lost because of it. Throughout Métro Rambuteau, the images visualize and invite viewers to look back upon the pile of debris left behind and swept out of sight as this part of the city and its inhabitants are thrust ahead into tomorrow. Images like these, as art historian Shelley Rice argues, serve as evidence of the city’s past transformations as much as they represent prescient “pre-visions of the future,” precisely because they suggest that this was not the first time Paris experienced such significant change, and will not be the last.26 If, like all of the photographs I discuss in the chapters that follow, the Métro Rambuteau series resists the kind of thinking that posits place as bounded and stable, it also works to unsettle the myth of the “smooth and relentless” passage of time.27 Petitjean’s work reminds us that photography 23 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 42. 24 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 463. 25 See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392–3. 26 Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 13. To wit: the entire site on which Les Halles has sat for centuries, and which, as I mention above, has been home to an underground shopping mall, transit center, and a large public park since the 1970s, was revamped in 2018. The new “Forum des Halles,” replete with a steel-and-glass “canopy” designed to resemble the overstory of trees in a forest, hearkens back to Baltard’s famous pavilions. 27 Edward Welch, “Experimenting with Identity: People, Place and Urban Change in Contemporary French Photography,” in The Art of the Project: Projects

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is a privileged medium by which to dislodge the erstwhile traces that reside and reverberate in sites that we often neglect or have forgotten altogether. The chantier does some of this work on its own, excavating, quite literally, what lies below the surface of the city’s streets and architectural structures. But photographs like these make that excavation visible, jarring the past loose from the foundations of memory and bringing it up to the surface to resonate with the present that it once was. One picture taken in the autumn of 1975 is particularly illustrative of this point (Figure 1.4). Here, in the last building standing on the parcel on the western side of rue Beaubourg just north of the Centre Pompidou, the destruction of an external wall reveals two workmen gingerly dismantling the casing and balusters of a staircase that dates to the reign of Louis XIII and which would later be installed for posterity in the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts. The image offers a potent reflection on the value of ruins and what we decide to preserve. But this photograph also depicts this important work of historical preservation from within a site that is, at the same time, being used to more conceptual ends. For just to the left of the two workmen, viewers will notice a series of circles that have been cut into the wall of the adjacent building as well as into the walls of the apartment inside. Here, in a building slated for impending destruction, American artist Gordon Matta-Clark was embarking on another in a series of iconic, site-specific works. Produced in 1975 over a period of two weeks, this piece, called Conical Intersect, involved the boring, mostly by hand, of concentric holes in the walls of a pair of early modern townhouses adjacent to the Centre Pompidou site. By the mid-1970s, Matta-Clark had already made a name for himself as an artist interested in the anatomy of urban landscapes when he met Marc Petitjean at the Paris Biennale in 1975. When the American told Petitjean he was looking for an abandoned architectural site for his next project, Petitjean introduced him to the condemned building at 29, rue Beaubourg, just across the street from his family’s apartment at number 24. In return, Matta-Clark invited Petitjean to shadow him for a few weeks and to document, in photographs and with video, the artist and his team of hammer-wielding assistants at work.28 Like much site-specific, conceptual, and land art from the 1970s—one and Experiments in Modern French Culture, ed. Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), 165. 28 Some of the photographs documenting the creation of Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect were taken by Petitjean’s younger brother, Nicolas.

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thinks of similarly provocative projects by artists like Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Vito Acconci, among others—the kind of work that Matta-Clark had become famous for is predicated on its own eventual (and often imminent) disappearance. Considering the necessarily ephemeral nature of a piece like Conical Intersect, which briefly transforms an architectural ruin into a work of art itself destined to turn into debris, the photographs and short film that Petitjean produced provide the work with a more tangible and lasting form. Gordon Matta-Clark used the disused remnants of the built environment as a canvas of sorts. While Conical Intersect engineers a distinctive geometric form to great effect, his “anarchitectural” practice most famously involved slicing condemned buildings in half. Regardless of which way his art cuts through “the waste material of architecture,” as art historian Pamela Lee notes, “it is always in the process of undoing itself, unbuilding as the artist described it.”29 Which is to say, as Lee goes on to suggest, that Matta-Clark’s work is critical of progress, of teleology, of the way time marches on incessantly toward the future. When Matta-Clark once said that “only our garbage heaps are soaring as they fill up with history,”30 his words echo those of Walter Benjamin, who reflects on the detritus of the past via the allegory of Klee’s angel. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that the large hole that the Conical Intersect bores into the building on the rue Beaubourg does not give out onto the sparkling novelty of the Centre Pompidou under construction a few meters to the south but, instead, looks back onto the heap of rubble left over from the neighboring building’s demolition immediately to the north (Figure 1.5). Conical Intersect shares an affinity with Petitjean’s photographic series in the way it grapples with the tension “between the narratives of historical progress—embodied in the construction of the Centre Georges Pompidou—and the destruction of a historical site that is a prerequisite for progress.”31 More specifically, the photographs contextualize Matta-Clark’s project within the larger, 22-year span in the lifecycle of this place, positing the American’s performative perforations as a metaphor for the gentrification that Métro Rambuteau documents. Matta-Clark’s site-specific intervention creates an intermediary state using as raw 29 Pamela M. Lee, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), xvi. 30 Quoted in Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, xvi. 31 Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 171.

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material an extant structure itself slated for demolition and replacement by new construction. At the same time, Petitjean’s images of Matta-Clark’s piece are shrewdly self-reflexive. The conical shape of the installation’s cuts hints at human vision by subtly evoking the photoreceptive cones of the eye. Holes pierced into walls also allude to the camera’s mechanical way of seeing. Petitjean’s photographs depict the creation, quite literally, of an urban aperture allowing light to filter into a camera, which is to say a chamber or a room, that looks out over the Beaubourg plateau. Petitjean’s images of Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect thus place the photographs that comprise Métro Rambuteau in a cunning mise-en-abyme. They picture a work of conceptual art become envisioning machine that peers down upon the death of a neighborhood from which will rise not so much a monument to modern and contemporary art, but, as Jean-Christophe Bailly calls it, a “mechanism for seeing.”32 It is fitting that Petitjean’s series of photographs would be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou’s Musée national d’art moderne in the winter of 1997, exactly 20 years after the Centre’s official inauguration in 1977. It is also apt that at around the same time the film that Petitjean made about Matta-Clark’s impermanent installation would be projected by French artist Pierre Huyghe onto a wall of the Quartier de l’Horloge residential sector just across the street from the Centre Pompidou itself. In this 1996 performance piece, an “anti-event” and homage that Huyghe called Light Conical Intersect, different temporalities are merged into one. After more than 20 years, Huyghe noted, once again “architecture is shot through with light; a phantom hole appears, causing two temporal elements to coexist. The cut-out in space is replaced by the cut-out in time.”33 All that remains from the projection that night is a digital print poster in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou’s modern art museum. Looking closely at this image, viewers will remark a faintly visible “Q” in the architectural signage for the Quartier de l’Horloge on the wall directly under the film’s projection (Figure 1.6). That this “Q” resembles a clock, its two hands forming the shape of a cone, hints (might it be a stretch to see a winking eye?) at the conical holes in the wall pierced by Matta-Clark and suggests how both artists challenge the way seemingly solid architectural forms can be deployed to highlight the plasticity of time. 32 Bailly, La Ville à l’œuvre, 139–40. 33 Quoted in Bruce Jenkins, Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect (London: Afterall, 2011), 78.

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An Architectural Anatomy Lesson Like Marc Petitjean, Stéphane Couturier, one of France’s leading contemporary photographers, built his reputation on series of photographs that make visible the creative destruction occurring in modern cities around the world. Trained as an architectural photographer, Couturier has since the mid-1990s photographed structures of various types, from series dedicated to suburbs in San Diego, a public housing project in Algiers, and art spaces like the Villa Noailles in Hyères and the Grand Palais in Paris, to car factories in Valenciennes and high-rise apartment complexes in Seoul, Moscow, and Chandigarh. An early adapter of some of his discipline’s most cutting-edge digital formats, over the years Couturier has been spending less time shooting in the field and more time creatively editing his images in post-production. As such, his work involves more than making photographs in the traditional sense of the term. Instead, his practice uses software to catalyze complicated superimpositions and manipulated conjunctions of photographs in striking composites that provide a dynamic, fluid impression of space. Some of this work even explores Couturier’s interest in the boundary that distinguishes still from moving images. Here, certain photographs appear to shimmer or vibrate, while the occasional videos that he produces seem almost photographic in their stillness. If Marc Petitjean photographed the Beaubourg plateau with, as he modestly admits, no “artistic pretensions,”34 Couturier’s approach to picturing Paris is more aesthetically ambitious. For one, whereas Petitjean shoots the Centre Pompidou within its broader context, showing how it comes to define the neighborhood in which it is located, in his first major series of photographs, Urban Archaeology, which spans from 1994 to 2010, Couturier singles out the inside of individual buildings seemingly isolated from the place they occupy in the city outside. Petitjean approaches photographing the worksite as a documentarian, making mimetic photographs of an architectural work in progress. Couturier, on the other hand, represents a more conceptual practice that captures the site “outside of time, outside the process of its becoming and its completion, an arrangement of objects, of machines, and of men, like photographs of installation art or sculpture.”35 His photographs deliberately sequester the structures from 34 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 4. 35 François Soulages, “Pour une esthétique du devenir. La photographie du

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the urban environment that surrounds them in order to more effectively focus the viewer’s gaze, “steer[ing] the eye into an engagement with form, structure, and surface.”36 These are intimate urban landscapes that absorb from within the anatomy of buildings under renovation. They home in on discrete materials and textures, fragmented and complex layerings of space, and nuanced chromatic gradations that suggest how ripe with pictorial form the typically unsung chantier can be (Figure 1.7). While they are not digitally manipulated like much of his later work, the photographs from the Urban Archaeology series are no less striking and complex. These pictures, many of which belong to some of the world’s finest institutions,37 exhibit exceptional depth of field and allow the viewer’s eye to amble over and across various planes. At the same time, through an effect of their composition, somewhat paradoxically, they can also appear shallow. As if in their absolute frontality these pictures at once invite and stymie our ability to perceive depth. Take, for example, an image from the Urban Archaeology series made in 2002 on a chantier on the boulevard Saint-Germain in central Paris’s sixth arrondissement (Figure 1.8).38 Here, inside and outside, foreground, middle, and back, natural and artificial, old and new combine in a dense constellation of fragments that at first defies rational understanding, but which is ultimately perceived as an elaborate assemblage of distinct masses and materials—concrete, steel, wood, sheetrock, and glass— layered in space and dissected, like a cadaver in an anatomy class, by the camera’s razor-sharp eye. In a clever twist on the classical ideal of the trompe-l’œil, this image, a kind of “anti-trompe-l’œil,”39 makes the real look surprisingly fake. If the traditional trompe-l’œil rhetoric is designed to lure the viewer, if only for a moment, until the illusion becomes chantier,” in Esthétique de la photographie de chantier, ed. Soulages and Angèle Ferrere (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017), 14. 36 Smith, The Life and Death of Buildings, 23. 37 Couturier’s photographs have been acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Gallery of Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. 38 While Couturier does not deliberately produce photobooks of his projects, a number of catalogues and publications document the trajectory of his career. The image from the boulevard Saint-Germain, for example, is reprinted in Stéphane Couturier. Photographies (Paris: Édigroupe/L’insolite, 2005), 66. 39 Matthieu Poirier, “Morpho-logies,” in Stéphane Couturier. Photographies (Paris: Édigroupe/L’insolite, 2005), 24.

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apparent, Couturier’s vertiginous photographs drag us into a stacked and segmented vision of the real that keeps us guessing so that we are brought to question, at every optical turn, what, exactly, we are seeing. The seamless concatenation of shapes, colors, lines, and masses, like the seemingly out-of-place red plane on the upper right, which viewers will recognize as modular containers used for the worksite’s administrative offices, lead to what Shirley Jordan has called a kind of “conceptual disorientation” that demands that viewers take the time to get their bearings, lest the image remain unintelligible.40 Like this photograph, others from the series manifest the way that the chantier, as Nancy notes, “makes an impression […] It imposes itself upon the gaze, invading it until saturation, in a visual concentration of matter and force.”41 Couturier’s pictures are impressive to behold because they take advantage of the worksite’s indiscriminate heaping of disparate construction materials on top of each other to give the impression that these materials have fused directly onto the surface of the picture itself, as if they had made physical contact with the photographer’s lens or might even be capable of impressing the worksite’s forms onto the beholder’s own eyes. To be sure, the optical power of Couturier’s pictures is evident in their reproduction on the pages of catalogues and photobooks or digitized on a computer screen. But it is most manifest when we consider the prints when they are framed and hung on the walls in a gallery or museum. Like many of the images to be discussed in the chapters to follow, Couturier’s photographs are conceived expressly as tableaux. The invention of the “tableau form,” as art historian Jean-François Chevrier memorably called it, describes a major shift in contemporary art photography when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, artists like Jeff Wall and Jean-Marc Bustamante began making large-format color prints designed to rival the size and impact of classical painting by taking up much more wall space and thus “summoning,” as Chevrier writes, “a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and ‘consumed’.”42 Thanks to their dimensions 40 Shirley Jordan, “Not Yet Fallen: Memory, Trace and Time in Stéphane Couturier’s City Photography,” Nottingham French Studies 53:2 (Summer 2014), 171. 41 Nancy, La Ville au loin, 80. 42 Jean-François Chevrier, “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography,” The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982,

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(anywhere from one to two meters per side), the range of colors and tones they exhibit, and the remarkably tight framing (which, in Couturier’s work is most notable in the lack of typical perspectival signposts like horizon lines or the presence of the sky), the tableau form facilitates for viewers what Couturier himself calls “entry into the very interior of the image, as if one were approaching it from very close up.”43 In the Urban Archaeology series, each large-format photograph confronts audiences with the innards of buildings that have the effect of appearing almost non-figurative, thereby echoing work of abstract American painting from the 1950s that aimed, according to the dictates of formidable critics like Clement Greenberg, toward a flattened, nonrepresentational picture plane. They also share much in common with Modernist artworks like Piet Mondrian’s 1914 Composition in Oval with Color Planes, which serves as just one among several compelling intertexts for Couturier’s work, based as it is on sketches of partially demolished buildings whose insides have been exposed.44 It is important to note that Couturier’s photographic abstraction of space also hearkens back to the early history of photography. In their pictures from the nineteenth century, various artists made creative use of naturalistic, centered, and fixed framing to render solid architectural forms, many of them under construction, visually vague, as if form were purified to prevent us from recognizing real things.45 Take for example a photograph made by Louis-Émile Durandelle in 1881 of a worksite inside a building under construction in central Paris (Figure 1.9). While this image diverges sharply from Couturier’s trans. Michael Gilson, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2003), 116. 43 Monique Sicard, “Les Pratiques hybrides de Stéphane Couturier,” Genesis. Manuscrits, Recherche, Invention 40 (2015), 106. 44 Scholars writing about the Urban Archaeology pictures reveal just how rich Couturier’s images are with intertextual associations. Shirley Jordan, to cite one especially compelling reading, shows how Couturier’s focus on construction materials and engineering techniques resonates with the representation of the Pont de l’Europe in Paris in two paintings by Gustave Caillebotte from the 1870s. See Jordan, “Not Yet Fallen,” 176. Couturier has also exhibited work that shows an affinity for the industrial landscapes of Fernand Léger. 45 For more on the ways that nineteenth-century photographers figured architectural forms abstractly, making even well-known sites like the Eiffel Tower unrecognizable, see Suzanne Lafont, “Nature et classicisme. La leçon du XIXe,” Revue photographies 7 (1985), 12–17.

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penchant for impression—Durandelle’s composition draws the eye to a vanishing point in the center of the frame to create a sensation not of flattening, but of stretching and of infinite depth—both share an affinity for complex conjunctions of lines, shapes, and patterns. Like Durandelle and Lyon before him, Couturier is clearly interested in the architectonics of the buildings he photographs, and in the physics behind their construction. As artist Suzanne Lafont notes, architectural photographs like these underline the idea that all buildings are a matter of forces applied to mass, perfectly illustrative of how gravity works.46 But these images also celebrate the extraordinarily aesthetic potential of civil engineering. Because of their size, Couturier’s photographs do so most spectacularly, organizing what Nancy calls the “shapeless” chaos of the urban chantier in exceptionally high definition.47 While they revel in the aesthetic potential of these places under construction, Couturier’s images do more than simply play with our eyes. If, as Petitjean’s photographs suggest, cityscapes inevitably evolve, Couturier’s pictures seem to say that that process does not come cheap. Taking the development of real estate as theme, I would suggest that the pictures that comprise the Urban Archaeology series are also concerned with economics. Couturier studied economics at university and has said that he often privileges sites “that are a part of economic and social history.”48 As they render the solid mass of the worksite abstract, his photographs acknowledge the flows of capital necessary for these sorts of transformations to happen. The past, as images by Couturier and Petitjean show, is not merely laced with symbolic violence done to places and the communities that surround them, it is intimately tied up with money. As Edward Welch succinctly put it, writing about Marc Petitjean’s eyewitness account of the development of the Beaubourg plateau in Métro Rambuteau, images like these “capture one of the city’s most fundamental rhythms, which dictates its history and the tempo of its development through the way it reclaims, reuses and revalues land—namely, the implacable rhythm of capital, with its cycles of creation and destruction.”49 Of course, photographs of the built environment often make the relationship between money and real estate conspicuous (as conspicuous, 46 Lafont, “Nature et classicisme,” 15. 47 Nancy, La Ville au loin, 87. 48 Stéphane Couturier, interview with Jean-Charles Vergne, in Stéphane Couturier, ed. Vergne (Clermont-Ferrand: FRAC Auvergne, 1999), 9. 49 Welch, “Experimenting with Identity,” 167.

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perhaps, as the relationship between money and the institutions that consecrate art as “art”). One might think of Ed Ruscha’s 1970 series Real Estate Opportunities, which depicts a hypothetical listing of lots for sale or rent in Los Angeles. Or of Hans Haacke’s 1971 installation that meticulously documented the holdings, in Upper Manhattan, of one of New York’s most powerful slumlords (Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971). Art photography has continued this trend, implying how the markets for finance and real estate are often interdependent. Take, for example, German photographer Andreas Gursky, who made a famous photograph of a building that embodies these two powerful industries, namely the headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), located in an innovatively designed skyscraper in Hong Kong. Gursky shot the building at night, when virtually all of the office lights were on, giving viewers a glimpse of what the building looks like on the inside and rendering the structure almost hive-like in appearance (Figure 1.10). The photograph’s sheer size50 mirrors the way the building imposes itself on the city’s skyline and reflects the power that the corporation seeks to project to its clients and competitors around the world. The photograph by Durandelle that I mentioned earlier also puts the dominion of capital on display. If histories of nineteenth-century Paris tend to privilege discussions of aesthetic, social, and cultural concerns, financial matters are just as crucial. More specifically, the period constitutes an important moment in the history of real estate speculation, which was rampant. As Stephane Kirkland notes, from 1853 to 1870, the French state spent two and a half billion francs on construction projects, more than the annual national budget. This figure does not even include projects that were finished by the start of Third Republic, nor “the Opéra and the Palais de Justice, the restoration of Notre-Dame, or the embankments and bridges along the Seine […] nor did it include […] the Palais du Louvre.”51 To help pay for these colossal and staggeringly costly projects, developers and financiers had to invent creative banking and borrowing schemes. They also had to take on massive amounts of debt. Baron Haussmann, for example, sold bonds 50 The framed picture is over one and a half meters wide and over two meters tall. 51 Stephane Kirkland, Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015), 270.

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that were traded and discounted on the public exchange, though he did so illegally since the value of those bonds would not be realized until the renovation projects were completed. Shareholders were in essence wagering on the rise in market value they optimistically believed would occur under Haussmannization. Topographic photographs of the urban chantier that I have been discussing here invite viewers to speculate, which is to say to observe closely, the forms they put on display. In doing so, they also encourage viewers to consider the relationship between the architectural subjects depicted and the speculation invested in their becoming. By “speculation” I mean here to say the buying and selling in search of profit from the rise and fall of market value, a meaning of the word that was first recorded in 1774. As curator Stephen Pinson notes, the term evolved over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer at once to “observation and meditation, theoretical calculation, or an industrial or commercial operation.”52 Durandelle’s photograph brings each of these meanings potently into play because, like Gursky’s photograph too, it is not simply a visually compelling picture of a building, but a picture of a building destined from its inception to house a corporation whose business model was designed to generate profits from the kind of speculative fiscal ventures that Haussmann and others had relied upon several decades earlier during the Second Empire building boom. This corporation was known as the Comptoir National d’escompte de Paris. Created in 1848, during the Second Republic, the CNEP was one of four financial institutions that converged into what would become known as BNP Paribas, one of the world’s largest banks. The original CNEP building still exists, and houses the BNP headquarters at 14, rue Bergère, in the Grands Boulevards neighborhood in Paris’s ninth arrondissement. Durandelle’s image serves as a striking intertext for Couturier, who in his Urban Archaeology series trains his lens on another major financial institution. In a series of large tableaux made on site in 2001 on the rue du Quatre-Septembre in Paris’s second arrondissement, a few blocks away from the old Paris Stock Exchange and just a short walk from the CNEP building that Durandelle photographed, Couturier documents the transformation of the headquarters of the Crédit Lyonnais bank, unearthing multiple strata of the building’s past (Figure 1.11). This site, 52 Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Word of L.J.M. Daguerre (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2.

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too, embodies the history of French capitalism. Initially built between 1876 and 1883 to house Crédit Lyonnais’s offices, the building, which underwent a massive renovation and expansion in 1895, was hailed as a marvel of modern engineering and design. With windows designed by Gustave Eiffel, a domed roof by Victor Laloux (who designed the Orsay train station), and a double-helix staircase modeled on that at the Château de Chambord, this regal building occupies an entire city block bounded by the boulevard des Italiens and the rues de Gramont, Choiseul, and Quatre-Septembre. In 1996, after a massive fire destroyed almost two thirds of that footprint, the Crédit Lyonnais, which still owned the site, sold it to the insurance company AIG for more than a billion francs. AIG then rebuilt a portion of the building according to specifications of yet another new owner, a German real estate finance corporation named the Deka Group. While the Centorial Building, as it is known, continues to house new occupants (including foreign offices of American hedge funds), it is still partially owned by one of France’s largest banks, LCL, which was formed after Crédit Agricole purchased Crédit Lyonnais in 2005. Couturier’s photographs document the huge reconstruction project undertaken by the AIG French Property fund in 2001, suggesting in the process the life, death, and rebirth of the building. When read alongside the history of the site, however, these pictures also allude to the new paradigm for capital markets, and especially the market for commercial property. All this in a city that in the late 1990s and early 2000s was becoming a vibrant hub for finance capital and global commerce. At the same time, I would suggest that photographs like these, and those by Durandelle, Gursky, and the other artists that I mention above, also shrewdly hint at every photograph’s inherent connection with money. Not merely because works by artists like Couturier and Gursky are regularly sold on the international art market for colossal sums.53 But because, as historian André Rouillé reminds us, the photograph, which emerged at the same time as the modern market economy during the nineteenth century, is an inherently fiduciary medium.54 Fiduciary trust, the idea that paper currency, a printed, material image, is actually “worth” something, functions in much the same way as photographic 53 Among all the French photographers I study in this book, Couturier’s photographs regularly sell for the highest prices, often in the tens of thousands of dollars. 54 Rouillé, La Photographie, 58–9.

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trust, or the belief that photographs, even optically intricate ones like Couturier’s, act as a “certificate of presence”55 that guarantees an equivalence between the image and the thing it represents. As we will see in the concluding section to this chapter, photographs by Petitjean and Couturier are especially sensitive to these presences, and to photography’s ability to capture for posterity traces of things that are destined to disappear. Precarious Lives and the Ghosts of Labor In their representation of the creative destruction of cities, where man and money coalesce to manufacture the urban landscape, many of the photographs I have discussed thus far evoke the ebbs and flows of global credit, the market for debt, the potential for bubbles, and the anxious rhythms of wealth creation and annihilation that have come to define an increasingly volatile form of market capitalism. They also encourage us, some more subtly than others, to think about what the rhythms of capital often obscure. For the worksite, as Nancy suggests, is often an erratic and enigmatic place, one that invites questioning and analysis: “What happened here? Why are there debris, stains, spots? How can we reconstitute what has occurred?”56 Photographs of the chantier pose these questions and, I would argue, occasionally answer them by reckoning with the social implications that undergird major urban development projects. Perhaps more importantly, they also recognize the casualties of that growth, namely those that the destruction and subsequent reconstruction of urban landscapes neglects to acknowledge and often leaves behind. While accounts of the building of the Centre Pompidou often focus on architectural innovation and ingenuity, and on the technocratic and political machinations that led to its construction, they tend to elide the turbulent effects that the Beaubourg chantier and subsequent ­gentrification of the neighborhood had on the community.57 Petitjean’s 55 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980), 135. 56 Nancy, La Ville au loin, 89. 57 For example, a major interview with the Centre’s architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rodgers makes no mention of the deleterious effects of the worksite on the surrounding area and its population. See Renzo Piano and Richard Rodgers,

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Métro Rambuteau, on the other hand, hints at the disruptive impact on local residents, many of whom can be seen looking on uneasily in awe at the upheaval. Like, for example, the photograph that captures the “caustic expression” of an elderly woman as she observes the construction of the Centre Pompidou “with a mix of consternation and disdain.”58 Or, in a similar shot of a cluster of stone-faced men gazing disparagingly at the rubble (Figure 1.12). Two pictures of Monsieur Denis, the beloved flower seller whose pop-up shop graced the corner of the rues Rambuteau and Beaubourg daily, serve as mementos of a fixture of the neighborhood who would eventually be uprooted. The first section of Petitjean’s book also includes portraits of the Pagès family who ran the bistro Au Rendez-vous des Routiers. During the renovation of the quartier, the family was dispossessed of their business by the city. Patriarch Serge Pagès recounts how they, like many others, were forced to leave Paris: “We no longer had a place there.”59 The expropriation of inhabitants that “reshaped the social identity of the city”60 was all too common during the building boom of the Trente Glorieuses, hardly a glorious period for all.61 In time, the place these inhabitants and small business owners occupied would be overrun with visitors from elsewhere: “The street no longer belongs to the shopkeepers, but to the thousands of tourists that pass through each day.”62 Perhaps as a remedy to this drastic social convulsion, or in response to the forced uprooting, Métro Rambuteau returns years after the work is Du Plateau Beaubourg au Centre Pompidou (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1987). 58 Welch, “Experimenting with Identity,” 164. 59 Quoted in Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 16. 60 See Paskins, Paris Under Construction, 4. 61 Kristin Ross notes that the renovation of insalubrious neighborhoods throughout urban France in the second half of the twentieth century impacted racial minorities in particular. Discourses of modernization, hygiene, and security were commonly invoked in the government’s implementation of a policy to “purify” the social body by appropriating buildings and evicting their inhabitants, many of whom were Africans who worked to build new housing in those same areas and who “found themselves progressively cordoned off in new forms of urban segregation as a result of the process.” See Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 150–2. 62 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 78.

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done and includes a series of shots of Petitjean’s neighbors in their homes at 24, rue Beaubourg. Other images in the photobook’s concluding section document a new sense of place in the area, teeming with life, that has emerged. Petitjean writes: Ten years have passed. Beaubourg and the quartier de l’Horloge have aged. Nothing of what I once knew has survived, save for the entryway to the Rambuteau métro station, now the only reference point of the old neighborhood […] There have been changes, but there has also been some consistency. Monsieur Denis, the florist and frequent customer of the Rendez-Vous des Routiers, was replaced by a North African street hawker. The flower buckets are no longer made of metal, but of colored plastic. The pigeons that used to perch on the trees at the intersection of the rue Beaubourg and the rue Rambuteau are still there and can even be seen on the metal beams of the Centre Pompidou.63

In an eerie omission, the Pagès family is nowhere to be found.64 It is fitting, once again, that Petitjean’s photographic chronicle of the Beaubourg plateau would include a section on Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect. For Matta-Clark, too, was keenly interested in the lives and afterlives of those who once occupied the discarded buildings he cuts through in his work, people who in many cases were themselves forced out. Though more conceptual, Matta-Clark’s work shares Petitjean’s interest in the social impact of gentrification. Like Métro Rambuteau, Conical Intersect dramatizes “a situation where communities are evicted from the land, dispersed, made powerless.”65 One gets the sense looking at the pictures of the local community in Métro Rambuteau—the woman in the storefront, Monsieur Denis, and the Pagès family—that they could anticipate, presciently, the impact the Centre would have on the neighborhood. A poster found near the Centre Pompidou worksite articulated the sentiment many inhabitants must have felt: “Luxury will be king,” the authors of the poster write, “But we will not be here. The commercial facilities will be spacious and rational. The parking immense. But we won’t work 63 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 78. 64 Petitjean would go on to develop his interest in precarious lives, notably in a 2006 series of medium-format color photographs of homeless people sleeping (or, in some cases, passed out) on the streets of Paris (in a series called “Preuves ordinaires”). 65 Peter Muir, “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: ‘Luxury will be king’,” Journal for Cultural Research 15:2 (2011), 174.

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here anymore […] We won’t live here anymore […] The renovation is not for us.”66 If discussions about the construction of the Centre Pompidou often avoid mentioning the fate of the local community, they also tend to disregard the workers responsible for the construction. As historian Jacob Paskins writes, “histories of the urban transformation of Paris rarely acknowledge the role of labor in the production of the built environment.”67 Perhaps because the presence of laborers on a worksite is impermanent, not unlike the scaffolding that supports much of their work. As we have seen in several photographs, Petitjean is sensitive to this elision, too. Several images accentuate the presence of workers who would otherwise remain invisible, like those charged with dismantling the antique staircase from the apartment building adjacent to the Centre Pompidou site (Figure 1.4), or two others in a no less precarious position out on a ledge of a nearby building shown, in a sequence of three images, removing a wrought iron railing from a second-story window. In contrast to these nameless workers, Métro Rambuteau gives voice to Monsieur Gaston, the proud demolition foreman pictured at work in his rig, where he is portrayed as an overconfident hero with concrete in his veins, steadfast in the face of grave danger and risk. “Every minute counts in demolition, every second, every gesture. It’s easy, I’m so used to it.”68 While somewhat difficult to discern, having shifted slightly during the exposure, several workers, one of whom can be seen wielding an imposing sledgehammer, figure faintly in the vanishing point of Durandelle’s photograph on the site of the CNEP as well (Figure 1.9). Perceptive viewers will also notice minuscule, white-collar office drones seated behind their desks and toiling through the night in Gursky’s representation of the HSBC building (Figure 1.10). Danny Lyon’s photographs of New York, too, resonate with a social consciousness, perhaps thanks to Lyon’s earlier experience documenting the struggle for civil rights in the South and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. A subsection of photographs from his 1969 series expressly depicts the anonymous demolition men responsible for the rebirth of Lower Manhattan, workers who, as the artist writes, “risked their lives for 66 Quoted in Norma Evenson, “The Assassination of Les Halles,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32:4 (December 1973), 312. 67 Paskins, Paris Under Construction, 91. 68 Petitjean, Métro Rambuteau, 53.

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$5.50 an hour, pulling apart brick by brick and beam by beam the work of other American workers who once stood on the same walls and held the same bricks, then new, so long ago.”69 Stéphane Couturier’s Urban Archaeology series also accounts for the often inconspicuous workforce responsible for urban renewal in the city of light, though it does so in a more subliminal and beguiling way. This is logical for an artist so focused on the geometries of the real in images that “end up imploding so that the subject fuses with its own representation.”70 Most critics would argue that Couturier’s practice necessarily avoids social realities because its focus on form and structure leads to a kind of high modernist detachment: “his work neither celebrates nor bewails phenomena that it might indirectly engage. Thus liberated from any imperative to moralize or to allegorize, the image attains a new aesthetic autonomy.”71 As I suggest above, however, Couturier’s practice nevertheless engages human concerns like the speculative conditions of modernity in some of the world’s global capitals. Perhaps more subtly than Petitjean or Lyon, Couturier’s photographs also recognize the role labor plays in the renovation of the buildings he photographs in Paris. This may at first seem incongruous, since one is often struck by what one critic calls the “systematic physical absence of human beings” in his pictures.72 But, for those who look closely enough, people are in fact present. “There, we can make out a worker,” notes Monique Sicard.73 Here, Sicard’s choice of words is crucial. For she does not “see” a worker in Couturier’s photographs (in this instance a photograph from a later series made in a Toyota factory in Valenciennes). Rather, she surmises (she uses the French verb “deviner”) or makes out his presence, conjuring almost out of nowhere a body that spectators could have easily missed. For human figures, when they are present in Couturier’s photographs, are always obscured, dwarfed, and almost swallowed up by the built environment that surrounds them. Looking back at the image of the Crédit Lyonnais site (Figure 1.11), for example, keen viewers might spot three laborers in 69 Lyon, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, 1. 70 Stéphane Couturier, interview with Jean-Charles Vergne, 14. 71 Matthieu Poirier, “Mutations,” in Stéphane Couturier. Mutations (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2004), 11. 72 Jean-Charles Vergne, in interview with Jean-Charles Vergne, Stéphane Couturier, 10. 73 Sicard, “Les Pratiques hybrides de Stéphane Couturier,” 110.

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green jumpsuits (two are wearing bright white hard hats) on the floor of the chantier. Some might even discern three more men on a scaffold on the left, as well as another small group of men tucked into a doorway on the right. The photograph of the worksite on the boulevard Morland (Figure 1.7), while lacking an overt human presence, suggests metonymically that a worker is close by, his deep blue hopsack draped over the yellow scaffold on the image’s left side. Still others might have noticed in the photograph taken on the boulevard Saint-Germain, this time in a blue work shirt and jeans covered in plaster dust, a worker framed by a hole in the wall in the lower left quadrant (Figure 1.8). Though this figure, blended into the site, his body emerging from the shadows and hovering “on the brink of invisibility,”74 is perhaps even more ghostly since, unlike the apparitions that haunt other chantiers in Couturier’s corpus, this man appears to have lost his head. I do not mean to suggest that Couturier’s photographic practice concerns itself overtly with the social conditions that make most urban construction sites possible. Nor that it takes the invisible struggle of labor as theme. But in the occasional allusion to labor that makes us squint and guess, in the representation of workers that are often hard to see, blended into the worksite and overwhelmed by the structures that surround them, could we not read the negligible but not entirely invisible presence of these ghostlike ouvriers, many of them disenfranchised migrants from France’s former colonies,75 as an acknowledgment of their precarity and disposability? 74 I borrow this turn of phrase from Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 19. 75 As Jacob Paskins notes, much of post-war Paris was built or renovated by migrant labor. Many of these workers would spend their days on site in central Paris and then leave the city to sleep in shantytowns on the outskirts. See Paskins, Paris Under Construction, chapter three especially. Sociologist Mathieu Rigouste nuances our understanding of the migrant worker by noting that throughout the second half of the twentieth century the French government systematically recruited workers from France’s colonies and former colonies. These workers were then subjected to methods of control and surveillance informed by colonial policing practices. See Rigouste, La Domination policière. Une violence industrielle (Paris: La Fabrique, 2012), 21–2. While the vast shantytowns have disappeared, the construction industry’s reliance on an immigrant workforce has continued unabated into the twenty-first century, even though it has become increasingly difficult for companies both big and small to recruit and hire non-French citizens.

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Photography, as Shawn Michelle Smith remarks, shows us “how much we don’t see, how ordinary seeing is blind.” The inadvertent sighting of workers in Couturier’s pictures could thus be considered a visible manifestation of what Walter Benjamin called the “optical unconscious,” which is to say “the revelation and recognition that we inhabit a world unseen.”76 Put another way, it is as if the photographs, unbeknownst to the artist himself, “want” the presence of the workers to be felt, as a reminder of how these structures literally came into being, and at what human cost.77 For buildings, like the photographs that represent them, do not just appear magically, materializing out of thin air. They bear traces of the physical efforts of hundreds of anonymized bodies responsible for their creation. In this way, we might entertain the thought of seeing the worker in blue on the chantier in the boulevard Saint-Germain not as a ghostly figure made to disappear behind a wall, sneaking off to make himself invisible and out of sight, but, rather, as a very real person coming into the frame, sneaking instead into our field of vision so that he can be seen, recognized for his work, and made whole once again.

76 Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 4. 77 I borrow this idea of photographic desire from W.J.T. Mitchell in What Do Pictures Want.

chapter two

Peripheral Visions, or Paris Orbital Peripheral Visions

The suburbs, I remember, were on the other side […] always over there, elsewhere. It was always the least faraway of all elsewheres, and the easiest of trips to make. But it still requires a trip, especially when one does not live there, when one was not born there, when on the contrary one lives inside the circle, inside the double-barreled wall comprised of the Maréchaux boulevards and the ring road. —Jean-Christophe Bailly1 The banlieue, the peri-urban, all of these confusing, jumbled spaces make for an exploded landscape, a sort of collage that is not without its charms. I do not think that the center will be an obligatory reference for twenty-first-century city dwellers. The center is moving. —Pierre Sansot2 The banlieue is not on the fringes but in the center: our common future depends on this shift in perspective. —Gilles Kepel3

1 Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Pas loin d’Arcueil,” in La Phrase urbaine (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 41. 2 Pierre Sansot, La Marginalité urbaine (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2017), 16. 3 Gilles Kepel, Banlieue de la République. Société, politique et religion à Clichy-sous-Bois et Montfermeil (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 10.

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 The banlieue will always confound those who do not live there. —Anonymous4

While technically not the geographical center of France—that honor ostensibly goes to the village of Bruère-Allichamps, in the Cher département5—Paris is nevertheless perceived, and has been for centuries, as the nation’s symbolic center. Paris is the heart of the Republic, the “heart of humanity,”6 as Pierre Larousse called it in his Grand dictionnaire universel du 19e siècle, the place through and by which all of the country’s economic and political lifeblood circulates. Given the financial, administrative, and intellectual resources afforded to the city of Paris, one might also consider it the brain of France, or even its neurological core. The city has been fetishized and prioritized to such a degree that its influence outshines the nation’s other population centers. In France, all roads lead to Paris. And all eyes turn to the capital in times of national crisis, or when major economic, political, or social debates erupt. Despite the growth of regional hubs around other major cities like Marseille, Lille, Lyon, Strasbourg, Nantes, and Bordeaux, the influence of Paris on the national, European, and world stages outshines them all. The exceptional concentration of wealth, influence, and opportunity, the critical mass of public institutions and private companies, and the emblematic weight accorded to Paris conspire to eclipse the demographic 4 In Jean Rolin, Zones (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 57. The citation, which Rolin came across at an exhibition devoted to the banlieue at the Maison de La Villette in Paris, is attributed to an anonymous youth from the Parisian suburb of Stains. 5 While some nearby villages in the Cher and Allier départements also claim this special status, Bruère-Allichamps was the first to do so in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1984, the National Institute for Geography in France proclaimed the village of Vesdun, also in the Cher, the geographic center of metropolitan France. In 1993, the Institute calculated that another sparsely populated village, Nassigny, in the Allier, could also be considered, but only if the extent of France’s borders were recalculated to include Corsica. 6 Quoted in Marcel Roncayolo, “Mutations de l’espace urbain. La structure nouvelle du Paris haussmannien,” in La Ville, art et architecture en Europe, 1870–1993, ed. Jean Dethier and Alain Guiheux (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1994), 57.

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reality that structures daily life in the city of light. For while Paris may seem large, it is home to only a little over 2 million people, making it only the fifth most populous city in Europe, slightly behind Rome but ahead of Bucharest.7 Things look quite different when one considers the larger metropolitan area. For the city of Paris is dwarfed by the urban agglomeration that surrounds it, and which counts almost six times the number of inhabitants living within city limits. If the 20 arrondissements that constitute the commune of Paris represent a space in which life is lived “at multiple speeds,”8 the Parisian periphery adds more than a few additional gears. Given the relative size of the urban and peri-urban girdle that makes up the greater région Parisienne, a territory that counts 412 more municipalities in a total surface area of almost 3,000 square kilometers, the priority given to the capital city, contained as it is within a mere 105 square kilometers, might seem somewhat unreasonable. While the hordes of tourists cannot be faulted for flooding into Paris throughout the year to experience all that one of the world’s most compelling cultural heritage sites has to offer, popular historians of Paris writing for a wide audience do not have the same excuse. As Derek Schilling has noted, generalist histories of the city often neglect the very existence of the periphery and refuse to acknowledge the symbiotic relationship between the département of Paris and the seven other “departments” in the Île-de-France that surround it and upon whose space and resources Paris relies.9 This “intramural bias,” as Schilling calls it, gives short shrift to those territories that lie beyond the city’s frontier, creating an artificial and “ideologically tendentious” distinction between inside and outside.10 While more traditionally academic historiography and geography focused on modern urban planning has done much to counter this tendency to whitewash the suburbs clean from the capital’s self-image, 7 While Paris houses two-and-a-half times as many people as France’s second largest city, Marseille, it does so within a much smaller surface area (41 square miles compared to Marseille’s 93). 8 I borrow the idea of a city à plusieurs vitesses from urban sociologist Jacques Donzelot. See Donzelot, La Ville à trois vitesses (Paris: La Villette, 2009). 9 As geographer Armand Frémont notes, Paris’s influence far surpasses the Île-de-France region. See Frémont, Portrait de la France. Villes et régions (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 19. 10 Derek Schilling, “The Extramural Effect: On the Discursive Futures of Greater Paris” (lecture, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, September 3, 2015).

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and while some key sociological studies shed light on the way post-war development affects inhabitants of peri-urban territories, much of this work is destined for the specialist or enlightened amateur.11 One could argue that when the popular press and news media, or works of literature, graphic novels, and certain feature films shed light on places located outside the city limits, they compound the spatial divide further by constructing an extra-mural stereotype that confirms a vision of the periphery as structurally isolated, comparatively impoverished, culturally vacuous, and frequently suffering from spates of violence and crime.12 For decades, the banlieue has been seen by many as disordered and chaotic. One has only to recall Paul Delouvrier’s 1965 urban master plan for the renewal of the Paris region, the Schéma directeur d’aménagment et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris, a document that notoriously referred to the suburbs as “poor, distant, and underdeveloped.”13 It is no wonder that generalist historians, tourists, and many inhabitants of central Paris themselves, while not altogether blind to the suburbs, often suffer from a form of tunnel vision that focuses their regard on the world within the city walls.14 If the mass media and popular culture occasionally provide a more expansive gaze of Paris and its place within the larger region, the vision they offer has 11 See, for example, Jean-Louis Cohen and André Lortie, Des Fortifs au périf. Paris, les seuils de la ville (Paris: Éditions du Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 1994); Annie Fourcaut, Un siècle de banlieue parisienne, 1859–1964. Guide de recherche (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988); Thibault Tellier, Le Temps des HLM 1945–1975. La saga urbaine des Trente Glorieuses (Paris: Autrement, 2007); and Wakeman, The Heroic City. 12 Mustafa Dikeç notes the media’s role in associating the banlieue with what he refers to as the “badlands of the Republic.” See Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 8. 13 Quoted in Paskins, Paris Under Construction, 90. One might trace the origins of the Schéma directeur back to 1961, when President Charles de Gaulle is said to have implored Delouvrier, his head planner, to make better sense of the suburbs: “What is it with these Parisian suburbs? […] Delouvrier! Organize this mess!” See Loïc Vadelorge, “Mémoire et histoire. Le villes nouvelles françaises,” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 98 (October 2005), 7–13. 14 As Jean-Christophe Bailly has noted, even though many Parisians know intuitively that Paris is not simply the city intra muros, they often struggle to acknowledge the “giant ensemble” that surrounds it. “This is something that makes rational sense but which very few Parisians actually understand.” Bailly, “De la ville à l’œuvre,” conversation with Dominique Viart, March 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py7wqPOBlZY.

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not changed much since the nineteenth century, when, as historian John Merriman reminds us, the fringes were commonly seen as places “where the power of government, capital, and urban elites is unevenly felt and resisted: the gray suburbs, the shantytown, the bidonville, la zone, ‘suburbs, home of small houses, small gardens, small dreams, and meager ambitions’.”15 Envisioning the outskirts in this way has, over time, emphasized the great divide that consigns the periphery, as Jean-Christophe Bailly notes in the epigraph above, to the status of “elsewhere.” As Juliet Carpenter and Christina Horvath write, these stereotypes reflect the fears of the dominant classes and “challenge the notion that these peripheral zones are a part of the shared, common space.”16 This has led to a hegemonic form of seeing the suburbs, a collective sort of peripheral vision marred by what specialists of perception call “Troxler’s fading,” an optical phenomenon by which a peripheral stimulus on the edge of our line of sight disappears from view. As writer and photographer Teju Cole puts it, if the fringes of our gaze glimmer with energy and call out for our attention, “movement in the margins is not enough. Regularity becomes invisible.”17 Which is to say that no matter how wide popular culture’s vision of the world extra muros might be, portrayals of the periphery as a sprawling, uneven, and unruly place have become trite to the point of being unnoticeable. Common representations of the urban perimeter do little to “decline the stereotype.”18 Over time the image of the suburbs as nothing more than what Victor Hugo once called a “bastard countryside”19 has become ingrained. The topographic turn in contemporary French culture writ large, on the other hand, heralds the specificity—what Michel Lussault calls the 15 John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations of the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6. Here Merriman quotes a line from Georges Duhamel’s 1934 novel, Vue de la terre promise. 16 Juliet Carpenter and Christina Horvath, “Introduction,” in Regards croisés sur la banlieue (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2015), 10. Mame-Fatou Niang notes even more strongly that the banlieue “is a non-place obliterated by the attraction of nearby cities.” See Niang, Identités françaises. Banlieues, fémininités et universalisme (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 2. 17 Teju Cole, “Second Sight,” The New Yorker, June 13, 2017, www.newyorker. com/culture/photo-booth/second-sight. 18 Mireille Rosello, Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures (Dartmouth, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1998). 19 Hugo, Les Misérables, 595.

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“geographicity”—of the Greater Paris region,20 thus counteracting the metaphorical fading out of peripheral perception. Cultural representations of the urban periphery that pay attention to the spatial form, topographic contours, and ways of managing growth and inhabiting these territories are turning the tide and encouraging a diverse public to see these places differently. New forms of narrative nonfiction crafted in situ by authors such as Jean Rolin, Philippe Vasset, and Éric Chauvier, among others, immerse themselves in often neglected peri-urban places and remind readers that Paris is a region, too.21 One might also think here of city planner Paul-Hervé Lavessière’s account of his circumnavigation of the capital’s environs on foot in La Révolution de Paris, a similar circuit around the Parisian periphery that geographer Luc Gwiazdzinski and economist Gilles Rabin trace in Périphéries. Un voyage à pied autour de Paris, or François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz’s photo-textual chronicle of their exploration of the B line of the regional train network in Les Passagers du Roissy Express, a text that paved the way for new literary inquiries of the peri-urban “terrain.”22 Topographically oriented works like these that document their authors’ ambulation around 20 The identity of the Greater Paris region, known tellingly as la région parisienne, is almost entirely indebted to the presence of the capital city at its center, and not to the many cities—from Bagnolet, Chelles, Vitry, and Livry-Gargan to Champigny, Argenteuil, Montreuil, Clichy-sous-Bois, and Sceaux, to name but a few—that surround it. The Greater Paris area, as Michel Lussault remarks, “depends on the visual capital of the city at its center, which does nothing but aggravate the already detrimental lack of geographicity that afflicts it.” Michel Lussault, “Les territoires urbains en quête d’images,” Urbanisme 342 (May–June 2005), 54. 21 See, for example, Jean Rolin, Zones (Paris: Folio, 1995), La Clôture (Paris: P.O.L, 2001), and Le Pont de Bezons (Paris: P.O.L, 2020); Philippe Vasset, Un livre blanc. Récit avec cartes (Paris: Fayard, 2007); and Éric Chauvier, Contre Télérama (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2011). For more on the “investigative” nature of texts like these, see Laurent Demanze, Un nouvel âge de l’enquête (Paris: Corti, 2019). See also Frédéric Martin-Achard’s article on literary interventions into the banlieues, “Des promenades dans cette épaisseur de choses reconstruites. Introduction au récit périurbain (Bon, Rolin, Vasset),” Compar(a)ison 1 (2008), 5–27. 22 Paul-Hervé Lavessière, La Révolution de Paris. Sentier métropolitain (Marseille: Wildproject, 2016); Luc Gwiazdzinski and Gilles Rabin, Périphéries. Un voyage à pied autour de Paris (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007); François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz, Les Passagers du Roissy Express (Paris: Seuil, 1990). One might also mention Retour à Roissy. Un voyage sur le RER B (Paris: Seuil, 2019), a text that revisits Maspero and Frantz’s itinerary, with texts by Marie-Hélène Bacqué and photographs by André Mérian. For more on the notion of littérature

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Greater Paris resist the center-periphery dialectic and consider Paris in a polycentric way. They do so by recounting each author’s experience crossing through these territories and seeking out the “secrets” of the banlieue that, for the anonymous inhabitant of Stains that I cite in the epigraph above, are only ever knowable by the locals. Not unlike these writers and thinkers, French photographers have sought to expand our understanding of peri-urban Paris in a similarly counter-discursive way. If modes of seeing the periphery in popular culture and the mass media have become so regular that they have become invisible to a population accustomed to seeing it that way, contemporary photographic practice makes these places apparent anew. A cohort of artists attend to some of the periphery’s most common places with a keen sensibility to topographic detail and an interest in tapping into the aesthetic possibilities of an environment that only rarely gets its due. In doing so, they move beyond the received idea of the banlieue as a relegated space antithetical to the city center and position it at the center of our gaze. Their work includes a number of photographic series that collectively posit the periphery’s most vernacular landscapes as an integral part of the city’s (and the region’s) identity and, more importantly, as a crucial lifeline to the city itself.23 Whether it brings to light sites located in the comparatively stable cities and towns in the proche banlieue, or inner suburbs, or those more blighted and isolated spaces farther afield—resisting in the process the normative, uniform appellation la banlieue in favor of the more kaleidoscopic les banlieues—this work disturbs mainstream ways of seeing and corrects visual biases by focusing on places that, however marginalized, have been there all along. As the following case studies show, photographs that investigate the landscapes of the Parisian periphery signal a shift in perception so that, as Gwiazdzinski and Rabin say, echoing the words of political scientist Gilles Kepel, “the margins may become the heart of the matter.”24 Which is to say that these photographs not only make some of de terrain, see Dominique Viart, “Les Littératures de terrain,” Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine 18 (2019), 1–13. 23 See Filippo Zanghi’s work on literature of the Parisian periphery, which aims, as he notes, to “move beyond the usual equivalency between the periphery and the banlieue.” Zanghi, Zone indécise. Périphéries urbaines et voyage de proximité dans la littérature contemporaine (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014), 21. 24 Luc Gwiazdzinski and Gilles Rabin, “Les Marges peuvent devenir des cœurs …,” Territoires. La revue de la démocratie locale 467:2 (April 2006), 16–18.

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the most commonplace and comparatively disregarded peri-urban zones around Paris’s iconic central core more conspicuous, they collectively render the periphery newly intelligible to a public that does not inhabit or frequent these places and which has been conditioned to see it as a cliché. On the City’s Edge As Éric Hazan has pointed out, the border separating the center of Paris from its periphery has shifted considerably over the centuries.25 The city has grown progressively outward from its central core, each successive wave marked by a sequence of walls, both literal and metaphorical, that have surrounded Paris, starting in the Gallo-Roman period when the first barrier was built around portions of the Île de la Cité. Six other walls would follow, culminating in the construction of the Enceinte de Thiers in the middle of the nineteenth century. This wall, which allowed for the annexation of neighborhoods like Montmartre and Belleville (and, thus, for the taxation of their inhabitants), established the modern contours of the city. Paris is in a sense defined by these layers. The history of the city’s walls is part of its lore. From the mur d’octroi, or mur des fermiers généraux, a tax wall constructed just prior to the Revolution, often considered one of the reasons behind the discontent that led to the overthrowing of the monarchy (according to a popular complaint, “le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant,” or “the wall walling Paris keeps Paris whispering”), to the Enceinte de Philippe Auguste built near the end of the twelfth century—a portion of which still visible today in the southern Marais, even though it serves as the western enclosure of a small soccer field, running track, and basketball court and, as such, is easy to miss—the lines that these old walls trace have proven so crucial because the city’s genealogy and its identity depend on the de facto and de jure separation between the banlieue and Paris proper. One of the most consequential photographic series that ponders the history and current state of these dividing lines was created in 1971. While it predates the Mission photographique de la DATAR by over a decade, this project, documentary in orientation, represents the peri-urban vernacular in a strikingly prescient way. Then, not long after 25 Éric Hazan, L’invention de Paris. Il n’y a pas de pas perdus (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

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having settled in Paris, Polish photographer Eustachy Kossakowski produced a sequence of 159 photographs taken at each formal point of entry into the city. From a distance of 6 m beyond the dividing line where Paris officially begins (and ends), each black-and-white image, shot from ground level, frames the administrative markers commonly known as “EB” signs, erected in accordance with article five of the ordinance of November 24, 1967 (Panneaux d’entrée et de sortie d’agglomération) that notify drivers and pedestrians when they are approaching (or, when coming from the other direction, exiting) the city’s limits.26 The words “PARIS,” printed in black lettering on a white background, appear in exactly the same spot in each photograph, which is to say in the center and a few centimeters from the upper border of each frame (Figure 2.1).27 These signs, still in use, and which have become so familiar that one critic can imagine only “outsiders” ever really noticing them,28 are attached to posts that, in some pictures, make them seem like broadshouldered sentinels standing guard before the city that lies immediately behind them. Thanks to Kossakowski’s iterative and exhaustive display, first exhibited to great fanfare in 1971 at the Musée des arts décoratifs and reproduced in a photobook published by the Éditions Nous in 2012, the panneaux make magically visible the usually invisible cartographic trace that separates Paris from its suburbs, clearly distinguishing the capital’s somewhere from its edgeland elsewhere, “which is to say, in the end, from nowhere.”29 Kossakowski, who made a name for himself in Poland as a photojournalist in the 1950s and 1960s, was an adept of an objective, matter-of-fact style of photography. His practice brings to bear a straightforward and systematic way of seeing on an idea, given form in his first Parisian series through the serial depiction of an object in the field.30 While critics have written about Kosskowski’s vision 26 Since the signs are only placed adjacent to roadways, one could argue that the municipal ordinance was devised with motorists primarily in mind. 27 With very few exceptions, each image printed for display measures 38 x 47 cm. 28 As writer and psychoanalyst Gérard Wajcman has noted, “In order to see these signs, one must come from elsewhere, from outside.” “Paris vu par,” in Eustachy Kossakowski, 6 mètres avant Paris (Caen: Éditions Nous, 2012), 11. 29 Wajcman, “Paris vu par,” 11. 30 Of note: between 1972 and 1977, Kossakowski produced a series of photographs called Palissades that focused on the ubiquity of construction sites in central Paris.

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in negative terms—that the project lacks a definitive subject, that its object is invisible, that it constitutes an “anti-atlas,” that it represents Paris’s opposite, that which the city is not31—they miss the point that the liminal and transitional space he photographs in 6 mètres avant Paris is, in fact, valuable. Kossakowski’s work obsessively attends to the details that comprise a placeless borderland but which the images promote as sites worthy of our contemplation. The images paint a picture of the Parisian fringe in the early 1970s. Cars, which had come to dictate urban design in the post-war period, abound (the Volkswagen Beetle and Citroën DS are especially prevalent). So too does politically conscious graffiti, some of it hearkening back just a few years earlier to the events of May 1968. Advertisements (Primagaz, Joker, BP, Le Livre de Poche) testify to the boundless imperatives of commerce. Passersby are occasionally visible making their way in, out, and around the city. And new construction, in the form of modern housing blocks built just in and outside the city limits and the bones of a new football stadium at the Porte de Saint-Cloud (the Parc des Princes), testifies to the intense pace of development in the waning years of the Trente Glorieuses. Thankfully for place-conscious viewers keen to know exactly where they are—adepts at Google Street View will delight in visiting these sites online to see how they have evolved over time32—each image is accompanied by a caption that identifies where it was made. These captions highlight further the distinction that urban planners (and inhabitants) make between the capital and its suburbs, since almost all of them are comprised of street names, each on different sides of the city limits. The avenue Gallieni becomes the avenue de la Porte de Vincennes when one passes from Saint-Mandé into Paris’s twelfth arrondissement. That the outlying street name is noted before its Parisian counterpart suggests the potential for passage from one realm into the other. Were we to keep moving we would cross over from the banlieue into Paris proper. Scanning through the sequence of 159 photographs, however, viewers will quickly realize that the pictures never manage to penetrate that threshold. Rather, the direction of travel that structures the 6 mètres 31 See, especially, prefaces by Adam Mazur and Cezary Wodzinski in Kossakowski, 6 mètres avant Paris. 32 Preferring to follow more literally in Kossakowski’s footsteps, filmmaker Julien Donada produced a short film in 2010 in homage to 6 mètres avant that rephotographs the same sites in color. See Donada, 6 mètres avant Paris, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8R_io9d52c.

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avant series is not a straight line but a ring that circles Paris in a counterclockwise fashion. The trajectory begins and ends at the city’s northernmost point near the Porte de Clignancourt. Kossakowski’s work thus documents a pedestrian orbit around the edge of Paris’s modern frontier at a moment when that frontier, thanks to the erection of the panneaux d’entrée in the late 1960s, becomes more concrete. Not unlike Paul-Hervé Lavessière’s work in La Révolution de Paris, which I mention above, Kossakowski’s series constitutes a photographic circumnavigation of peri-urban Paris. His is a vision of Paris Orbital, to borrow a turn of phrase from Welsh writer Iain Sinclair, whose account of his own circling on foot around London’s much larger orbital road, the M25, was published in 2002. Like Sinclair’s, Kossakowski’s project rounds the city’s perimeter “in the belief that this nowhere, this edge, is the place that will offer fresh narratives.”33 The “orbital” nature of these projects warrants further reflection. The etymology of this word reveals that the concept of celestial orbit was not used until the seventeenth century. Its original usage, which dates back to the Middle Ages, was more terrestrial, referring to a rut, a track, or a trace worn into the ground. The term also derives from the Old French for the eye socket (orbite), a structure that holds and restrains the center securely in its grasp. Rather than being relegated to the sidelines, the circular track around Paris that Kossakowski’s pictures trace, orbiting the city like a satellite around the earth, becomes a necessary feature of the city’s physiognomy that not only gives Paris its characteristic shape and anchors the city safely in place, but also frames a view of the urban core whose contours it defines. While Kossakowski’s series makes visible the administrative border between the city of Paris and the places that surround it, the photographs also hint at the potential for permanent exile. The pictures position viewers on a threshold, poised for entry. But they ultimately leave us to tarry on the cusp. Passage into the city after orbit is not as straightforward as it might appear. Especially when we consider Kossakowski’s immigration to Paris from Soviet-controlled Poland in 1970. For the artist, the French capital represented a promised land of sorts. As his wife Anka Ptaszkowska once noted, the very word “PARIS”—given form in the signs at the center of all of Kossakowski’s pictures—stood for a legendary space of freedom and democracy: “The myth of Paris 33 Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002), 14.

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was at the time incredibly powerful in our native Poland. In the context of our totalitarian system it embodied two kinds of nostalgia: for freedom and for culture.”34 Given this context, the signs signify the end of a journey, and the anticipation of sanctuary. But not without some struggle. In 1971, at the time he began working on 6 mètres avant, the couple were looking for ways to extend their visas. The possibility that they would not be able to stay in Paris began to weigh on them. The “No Truck Parking” signs that are attached directly above the “PARIS” signs in a great many of the images in Kossakowski’s series, as well as the occasional photographs that picture “No Entry,” “Road Closed,” “Dangerous Crossing,” or “Dead End” signs, seem to address the immigrant experience directly and serve as useful metaphors for just how difficult it can be for foreigners to find a refuge and a home (Figure 2.2). Though the dividing line between Paris and the rest of France might have been fluid at the time—tax walls and centuries of defensive fortifications had long since disappeared—the series suggests how the signs may also appear hostile and halting. The arresting potential that these signs may signal to prospective visitors that they are, in fact, not wanted here takes on added resonance when we consider Kossakowski’s project in the context of the migrant crisis that has marked Paris, as much as it has other major cities in Europe, since 2015. Especially because many of the same sites depicted here, especially those on Paris’s northern border, near the Porte de la Chapelle, for example, have been transformed into migrant camps and precarious tent cities that the authorities are constantly grappling to control. For the refugees fleeing war, political violence, extreme poverty, and climate change in their home countries, Paris, and France more generally, would make for an ideal asylum. But their hope for a new life in the capital, or elsewhere in France, is often stymied by the administrative hurdles that resettlement entails. Many of them are quite literally blocked by a bureaucratic impasse. Many among the thousands of African and Middle Eastern migrants who have undertaken perilous journeys will be condemned to remain on the brink, stuck on the outside looking in, lost in an orbit with no place to land.

34 Anka Ptaszkowska, “159 haltes autour de Paris,” in Eustachy Kossakowski, 6 mètres avant Paris (Paris: Éditions Nous, 2012), 9.

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Picturing the Périph As they peruse Kossakowski’s series, perceptive viewers will note that in around 30 of the photographs elevated sections of the city’s ring road, or boulevard périphérique, are visible, often tracing diagonal sight lines laterally across the picture plane. While parts of this massive urban undertaking were already completed in 1971, when Kossakowski was circling Paris along the pathway the périphérique would take, its construction would not be completed until two years later. In this way, 6 mètres avant Paris documents the emergence and earliest uses of the most recent and perhaps the last in a long line of the city’s outermost material—and metaphoric—borders. As Kristin Ross notes, the boulevard périphérique “replaced the old fortifications with a kind of permeable wall of traffic that, for the Parisian inhabiting and working within the charmed ‘inner circle,’ made the banlieues seem some formless magma, […] a circular purgatory with Paris—paradise— in the middle.”35 The boulevard périphérique, while specific to Paris, resembles orbital roads like it in major cities around the world, though it is much closer to the city center, and thus much shorter. The périph, as it is informally known, measures a mere 35 km in total length. Its expanse thus pales in comparison to Washington, D.C.’s beltway (103 km), the aforementioned M25 around London (188 km), or Berlin’s Bundesautobahn 10, commonly known as the Berliner Ring (196 km), the longest ring road in Europe. What the périph lacks in circumference, however, it makes up in symbolism, in history, and in its impact.36 The force of what one architect called this “dirty old brute” has remained strong.37 For the périph not 35 Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 54; emphasis original. 36 The idea for the périph emerged in the early 1940s. During the dark years of the Nazi Occupation, French planners, informed by German geographers whose vision of Paris centered around the idea of containment and isolation, began to conceive of a ring road that would prevent Paris from bleeding into territories outside the city’s limits, and vice versa. They contended that in order to retain its identity as a world-class city, Paris needed to be clearly defined, and in an “elegant” fashion, “so that foreign visitors, coming in from the outskirts, could say ‘There is Paris’ without confusing it with Levallois, Aubervilliers, Pantin, Vitry or Malakoff.” From a report penned in 1943 by the Inspector General for the Vichy Government, René Mestais. Quoted in Régine Robin, Le Mal de Paris (Paris: Stock, 2014), 239–40. 37 François Chaslin, “Périf, grand boulevard,” in Chaslin and Olivier Pasquiers,

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only separates Paris intra muros from extra muros, it effectively isolates the city center from the “formless magma” on its fringes. While the boulevards des maréchaux, named after elite generals who served under Napoleon during the First Empire, encircle the city at its edges, the périph, named after no one and located even closer to the city’s true administrative limits, is what most visibly divides the 20 arrondissements that comprise the municipality of Paris from the surrounding four départements, composed of 29 surrounding communes, and the region that lies beyond.38 Sometimes seen as an insurmountable wall, eight lanes of moving traffic that enclose the city in a six-mile diameter, one could even consider the road an honorary arrondissement unto itself, the twenty-first,39 inhabited fleetingly by hundreds of thousands of temporary périphériens who circulate around it each day. Those lucky enough to live inside its confines are blessed with access to transportation networks that those living farther afield can only dream of. The city center is the economic, cultural, and administrative center of France, and the 2 million inhabitants of Paris proper benefit in myriad ways from proximity to these halls of power and influence in ways that the 9 million inhabitants of the Greater Paris region, many of whom lack reliable and convenient modes of transport, do not. If Paris is the “heart” of France, and the core of the region that surrounds it, as architect Richard Rogers has remarked, the construction of the périph effectively disassociated it from its limbs.40 Far from France’s most popular thoroughfare, it is nevertheless the most consequential. If Kossakowski’s project turns glimpses of a massive site of urban planning into a locus where hope for a better future is tempered by the despairing prospect that one might never actually make it across the line and find a true home in “Paris,” in his series Périphérique, made in 1994, photographer Patrick Tourneboeuf ponders the expansive symbolic logic of the peripheral road’s liminal status through a nocturnal investigation of its material forms.41 Tourneboeuf, who Paris, carnet périphérique (Grâne: Créaphis, 2011), 5. 38 Another orbital road, the A86, constitutes a second outer ring that encircles, albeit irregularly, a wide swath of the Greater Paris region. 39 Though that distinction is ordinarily bestowed upon the city of Neuillysur-Seine. 40 Quoted in Justinien Tribillon, “Dirty Boulevard: Why Paris’ Ring Road Is a Major Block on the City’s Grand Plans.” Guardian, June 26, 2015, https://www.theguardian. com/cities/2015/jun/26/ring-road-paris-peripherique-suburbs-banlieue. 41 Tourneboeuf’s project is only one among several photographic meditations

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was born and raised on the outskirts of the capital and witnessed the construction of the ring road firsthand as a child, is no stranger to large-scale construction projects. His work, especially the special commissions collected in his photobook, Monumental, from 2010, portray some of France’s most iconic museums, libraries, archives, and architectural wonders in various states of renovation and repair.42 To be sure, the Monumental series constitutes a compelling reflection on the preservation of France’s cultural patrimony. Not unlike the work by Marc Petitjean and Stéphane Couturier discussed in the previous chapter, however, it also seeks to disorient spectators in its presentation of sites—like the Château de Versailles, the Palais de Tokyo, the Grand Palais, and the Châtelet theater—rendered raw and exposed by the construction. In this way, these places allow viewers a glimpse of a secret, inner life visible only when the artifacts (and the throngs of visitors) are removed.43 The périphérique project, one of the first complete series Tourneboeuf ever exhibited, shares much with this other work, notably in the way it brings its subject to light. But it also corresponds well with the artist’s longstanding interest in more common spaces from across the French territoire that he develops in the aptly titled Nulle part (Nowhere) series, a work that reveals the desolate, otherworldly appearance that France’s seaside communities take on in the off-season. If Monumental exposes some of France’s most renowned heritage, uncloaking elements of each place’s grandiose façade, Périphérique makes the opposite move and, like in Nulle part, turns a “nowhere” into a somewhere, positing one of the most massive and lasting, but also mundane and utilitarian, works of aménagement du territoire to have emerged during the

on the boulevard périphérique. See, for example, the collective of photographers united to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the périph’s inauguration in a volume entitled Périphérique, terre promise (Paris: Éditions Hartpon, 2013), as well as photographs by Olivier Pasquiers in a photobook produced with architect and critic François Chaslin, Paris, Carnet périphérique (Grâne: Créaphis, 2011). See also Jean-Claude Gautrand’s series on the modernist architectonics of the ring road in Métalopolis from 1964. 42 Patrick Tourneboeuf, Monumental (Paris: Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Éditions La Librairie de la Galerie, 2010). 43 If Tourneboeuf’s penchant for photographing the anatomy of buildings under construction feels familiar, it is likely because earlier in his career he served as an assistant to Stéphane Couturier (see Chapter One).

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30 “glorious” years of post-war development as a singular aesthetic object. While normally a “no-man’s-land” off limits to pedestrians and cyclists,44 the city of Paris granted Tourneboeuf unprecedented access, allowing him to roam the road on foot. Over four different nights between February and April 1993, accompanied by a press officer from the city government, he photographed the ring between 3 and 4 a.m., when traffic, otherwise horrifyingly dense, usually enters a period of relative calm. While the photographs’ long exposure times sometimes capture the bright trails of headlights whizzing by, the pictures effectively decelerate an exceptionally busy conduit that accommodates an average of 1 million drivers a day traveling in 270,000 vehicles at 45 miles per hour. The result makes the périph, usually buzzing with activity, seem eerily silent, oneiric, and serene (Figure 2.3). Given the absence of at-grade crossings, sidewalks, or traffic lights, the périph is designed to be a space of pure flux and flow. As many of the photographs in Tourneboeuf’s series attest, it is a highway unlike any other, serpentine and undulating, “like a river, with its two banks.”45 More than a street, more than any other boulevard in France, it is a territory, however liminal, unto itself. As one driver put it: “It’s elsewhere. It’s just an access route, a space for transiting. You never travel on the périph. You go somewhere else via the périph.”46 The magic of Tourneboeuf’s intervention, however, is that his pictures transform this vehicular non-place into a site to see. In contrast to the anxious nerves that the road elicits during the day, here streetlights illuminate the space and give it an ethereal glow. Devoid of traffic, the photographs are free to focus on the masses and reliefs, edges and nooks, and patterns and surface features comprising the périph. Tourneboeuf is keen on highlighting the boulevard’s various architectonic forms, reminding viewers that civil engineering, even the most utilitarian kind, involves a great deal of design. His images luxuriate in the sinuous connecting roads, the smooth sloping of on and off ramps leading to and from one of 38 “gates” of Paris (the city counts 71 in all), the reflective sheen that emanates from tunnels and galleries when the lights hit 44 Unlike any other boulevard in Paris, circulation on both inner and outer loops of the périphérique is strictly limited to motorized vehicles. 45 Richard Copans, dir. Paris Périph. Les Films d’ici, 2004. 46 In Paris Périph. Readers can catch Tourneboeuf at work on his Périphérique project at minute 24 in Copans’s film.

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just right, and the sheer heft of the columns supporting the weight of overpasses (Figure 2.4). These pictures are especially sensitive to various textures of concrete, asphalt, brick, metal, aluminum, and stone, and to different species of trees and grasses that crop up in unlikely places where they don’t quite belong. Straight lines, hard angles, and elegantly drawn curves spell out a grammar all their own, while the occasional signage points us in the general direction of entryways into and out of Paris. While Tourneboeuf only exhibited these pictures once, in 1994, almost a decade later he selected 20 images to be published in a limited series of 1,000 carefully produced photobooks.47 A good deal of thought clearly went into the layout, production, and printing of this relatively small-format work whose dimensions—roughly 14 by 18 cm—belie the proportions of the edifice rendered monumental by the photographs contained within. The fluidity and vertiginous sense of disorientation suggested in the pictures is cleverly embodied in the book’s spiral, “wire-o” style binding. An artful homage to one of French photography’s most famous practitioners of Paris by night, Hungarian-born Brassaï, whose 1933 volume Paris de nuit was also produced with a metallic helix, the coiled binding of Tourneboeuf’s book smartly evokes an endless trajectory around the road that figures in its pages.48 Even exacting cartographically minded viewers are likely to be left confounded by these timeless, black-and-white representations of a closed-circuit loop with no definitive beginning or end. Round and round we go, spectators become noctambulists in a perpetual and somewhat surreal tour around the périph by night, at a moment when most Parisians are fast asleep.49 Lacking any captions or titles, the images that comprise Tourneboeuf’s orbital vision often leave us wondering about the direction of travel—clockwise, counterclockwise, or perhaps even otherwise—as much as they prevent us from identifying which way to go to get to the city center, or which way to head out to the suburbs. By blurring the boundary between the urban and the 47 Patrick Tourneboeuf, Périphérique (Bayonne: Éditions Atlantica, 2003). 48 As Kim Sichel notes, the use of a metal spiral to bind the pages of Paris de nuit was very innovative at the time of the book’s publication in 1932. See Sichel, Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 1 and 51. 49 That several pages of the photobook are left intentionally blank, and matte black, is suggestive of what the ring road must look like when one closes their eyes.

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peri-urban, between intra and extra muros, Tourneboeuf’s series, a canny hodological phantasm, invites us to reconsider the périph’s status as yet another in a historical series of material enclosures around the city.50 For not only do these pictures reveal the ring road’s illusory and enchanting nature at once, they suggest that the boulevard périphérique is perhaps less monolithic and thus more easily surmountable than it might seem, more akin to the gaseous rings of Saturn than an imposing material and symbolic wall, the “frontier of geographic and social apartheid”51 that it is in many ways considered to be. Beyond the Wall An important manifestation of the built environment that lies beyond the wall that the périphérique represents, an element that shapes the topographic imaginary of the banlieue, is the cité, or public housing project. Remarkable for their mundanity, and universality, les grands ensembles, the ubiquitous block dwellings that compose most cités and in which many of its inhabitants live, were built in response to a post-war housing crisis that became increasingly dire as the population boomed.52 While an earlier version of affordable, mass public housing, the HBM (habitation à bon marché), became popular during the interwar period, with numerous projects built on or around the city’s borders—in what used to be known as the zone non aedificandi, the 250 m wide ring beyond the city limits that was established in the 1840s 50 Éric Hazan refers to the périphérique as a “concrete enclosure.” Hazan, L’invention de Paris, 461. 51 Robin, Le Mal de Paris, 241. For more on the périph as a concrete as well as mental barrier that distinguishes the city center from the banlieue and which, for inhabitants living just outside of the ring road, “is not always easy to cross,” despite the permeability afforded by its many open “gates,” see Fabien Truong, “Au-delà et en deçà du Périphérique. Circulations et représentations territoriales de jeunes habitants de Seine-Saint-Denis dans la métropole parisienne,” Métropoles 11 (2012), https://doi.org/10.4000/metropoles.4568. 52 As geographer Pierre George notes, the population of the Greater Paris region exploded in the post-war years, increasing from five and a half to eight million inhabitants in less than a generation. See George, “Présent et avenir des ‘grands ensembles’. Un appel à l’étude de la géographie humaine à la sociologie,” in Banlieues: Une anthologie, ed. Thierry Paquot (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2008), 81–2.

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upon construction of the fortifications, and in which building was prohibited—the term grand ensemble emerged in the 1930s and came to refer to “batteries” of new construction, usually in the form of high-rise towers and low-rise blocks built even farther afield and destined to house at least 4,000 people each.53 By the middle of the 1950s the sight of what Marcel Cornu called these “strange urban forms,” like alien motherships idling on what was once flat farmland, was becoming commonplace across the peri-urban landscape: “increasingly wide and increasingly tall residential buildings, built in blocks that were poorly integrated into the surrounding towns […] Each grouping seemed to constitute a town unto itself. They certainly did not look like what we would call a city. Their architecture was puzzling. So we named them grands ensembles.”54 Initially, the construction of the grands ensembles was seen as a solution to the lodging crisis. As planner Maurice Rotival once noted: “We must dream of seeing our children healthy, happy, playing on grass and not on the sidewalk. We dream, in a word, of urbanism that seamlessly integrates low-cost housing with the development of large cities.”55 Despite the enthusiasm of the technocrats, architects, and politicians who supported construction, the dream quickly came to an end. The quest for efficiency, a resistance to the Babylonian ideal of the city, and a will to sanitize daily life could not cancel out the hard fact that these housing projects were constructed rapidly, without much technical or financial foresight, on the most readily available and affordable land.56 Making matters worse, since their inception the grands ensembles had been based on a logic of the îlot, a small, isolated island unto itself, and not of the rue, or street, which lends itself more readily to community and principles of solidarity. Moreover, because these projects were conceived as “spatially and socially autonomous entities,”57 planners 53 See George, “Présent et avenir,” 80–2. Urbanist Maurice Rotival is credited with having first used the term grand ensemble in a piece published in L’architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1935. See Frédéric Dufaux, Annie Fourcaut, and Rémy Skoutelsky, Faire l’histoire des grands ensembles. Bibliographie, 1950–1980 (Paris: ENS Éditions, 2003), 10. 54 Marcel Cornu, Libérer la ville (Tournai: Casterman, 1977), 60. 55 Quoted in Thierry Paquot, Désastres urbains. Les villes meurent aussi (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2015), 36. 56 George, “Présent et avenir,” 80–2. 57 Collot, La Pensée-paysage. Philosophie, arts, littérature (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011), 73.

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neglected links to the rest of the urban fabric, most notably to the city center. Lack of public transport quickly led to the structural isolation of marginalized denizens who lived and continue to live there, notably poor French and foreign workers for whom life has become increasingly precarious. “The grand ensemble aspired to be ‘experimental,’ but it is actually banal and ghettoized, stress-inducing even.”58 The social project of the grand ensemble is almost uniformly viewed as a failure, leading one urbanist to call it an “artificial catastrophe” that “emerges out of policies earnestly claiming to be beneficial.”59 A number of French photographers have taken to looking at these places anew, reminding viewers how, despite their complex history, the grands ensembles are nevertheless fundamental components that comprise the social tissue of the Greater Paris area. While these images and series of images might at first appear to confirm the otherness of the grands ensembles and accentuate their distance, marginality, and isolation from the fabric of urban life, careful consideration reveals a less overtly critical position. Instead, contemporary photographic projects position the grand ensemble as a privileged motif to reconsider the complexity of the periphery, and to complicate the way we see it, reminding us that it is a space that, while increasingly seen as a major technocratic failure, nevertheless represents a crucial moment in post-war France’s march toward modernity. Mathieu Pernot’s aptly titled Le grand ensemble is one such series. A tripartite assemblage of images that was published in book form in 2007,60 Le grand ensemble sets out to create an “archaeology” of places on the periphery of France’s major cities, contrasting the utopian impulse of these neighborhoods with the difficult reality of their increasing obsolescence. Like Kossakowski and Tourneboeuf before him, Le grand ensemble makes a marginalized space, overdetermined in the French political and social imaginary, visible in innovative and provocative ways. Le Grand ensemble takes as its point of departure a personal archive of topographic postcards that Pernot collected in 2005 and 2006. 58 Paquot, Désastres urbains, 34–5. 59 Paquot, Désastres urbains, 7. 60 Mathieu Pernot, Le grand ensemble (Paris: Le Point du Jour, 2007). Unlike the large-format photobooks to which I refer throughout this study, Le grand ensemble, not unlike Tourneboeuf’s Périphérique, is a relatively small publication, measuring 18 by 25 cm.

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These postcards, which have all but disappeared from circulation,61 depict a variety of social housing projects in towns from across the Parisian periphery, from Poissy and Sarcelles-Lochères to MaisonsAlfort and Meaux (see Figure 2.5). Produced during the heyday of the Trentes Glorieuses by editors like the Éditions Guy, Lapie, and Combier, the cards were used by builders and local authorities as promotional materials to help advertise these new neighborhoods to future residents. As Jean-Christophe Bailly notes, the cards became part of the topographic imaginary in the same way that cards of more iconographic sites marked themselves on the collective consciousness at the time. Especially since the names of the cards’ editors are printed in a distinct typeface that sets each series apart from the others (Bailly focuses on the “Yvon” brand). These names constitute a salient mnemonic, a sign of recognition, “like silent passwords that provide access to a space of shared memories.”62 Throughout the first half of the book, Pernot reprints 30 of these cards, each on their own page. Initially photographed in black and white, the postcards were then hand painted during printing. This process, as one critic pointed out, transforms them “from document to fantasy vision of a modernist utopia.”63 The coloring, which often comes across as gaudy and garish, turns some of the developments into imagined, seemingly toylike assemblages, a vision that corresponds with the dreamlike aspiration of planners who, initially at least, ascribed to “the belief in modern architecture as a vehicle of social progress.”64 Pernot gives this portion of his larger series the title Le meilleur des mondes,65 suggesting the illusive and potentially perilous nature of this peri-urban phantasy. The oneiric quality of the postcards is echoed in the aerial vantage from which 61 As a remedy to this lack of iconography, two Canadian artists who also happen to be residents of Paris, Stéphane Degoutin et Gwenola Wagon, produced a series entitled Postcards from the Paris Suburbs that also aims to bring these places to light. See http://www.nogovoyages.com/postcards_from_paris.html. 62 Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le Dépaysement. Voyages en France (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 450. 63 Rebecca Drew, “Mathieu Pernot,” Photoworks 9 (October 2007–April 2008), http://mathieupernot.com/textes_04.php. 64 Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xiii. 65 This is a nod to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World from 1931, translated into French as Le meilleur des mondes.

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some of the views were shot, a way of seeing the grands ensembles that attests to their spectacular rewriting of urban space. Compared to a top-down perspective along the vertical axis, these oblique aerial impressions taken at an angle give viewers a better idea of the place each structure occupies on the ground and within the surrounding landscape, suggesting how idealistic visions of mass housing are often grounded in rational design.66 Interspersed among the postcards are images emerging from a related series that Pernot calls Témoins (Witnesses), which depicts the faintly visible presence of human figures inhabiting the very same housing developments represented in the cards themselves. By zooming in on and enlarging these figures so that they occupy most of the image’s frame— while each takes up an entire page in full bleed in the photobook, gallery or museum prints are enlarged to 50 by 60 cm, or larger, for public exhibition—Pernot gives agency to actors in space, momentarily privileging people over the places they inhabit. When seen in the original postcards, these human forms seem stunted by the built environment, manifesting like small alien life forms captured from afar by a passing satellite, but oblivious to its presence high in the thermosphere. These people, passive “witnesses” to the phenomenon of urban development all around them, provide pixelated impressions of life in the cité: a couple walking their child in a pram, a little girl playing, a boy on a scooter, and, in what is perhaps the most haunting of magnifications, two women looking over their shoulders (Figure 2.6) who seem, somehow, to recognize our presence, suturing the viewer into the frame of the image and subtly positioning us as témoins to the emergence of the grands ensembles, and to the lives lived there, too. While in the original postcards these figures are often covert and sometimes even so miniscule it would take looking with a magnifying glass to recognize them as people, Pernot’s canny blow-ups position them as haunting reminders of the confluence of visionary impulse and quotidian realities that the grands ensembles represent. In the book’s second half, “Toujours c’est aussi long que jamais. Pièce en 55 actes” (“Always Is as Long as Never: A Play in 55 Acts”), Pernot reprints production details from the back of postcards in his 66 For more on aerial views of France’s public housing projects see Raphaële Bertho, “Les grands ensembles. Cinquante ans d’une politique-fiction française,” Études photographiques 31 (Spring 2014), http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesphotographiques/3383.

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collection. While many of them are not dated, those that are go back as far as the 1940s. A few more examples from the 1990s suggest the continued circulation of architectural postcards through the end of the twentieth century. Pernot transcribes precise geographical detail (“En avion au de-dessus de … Ermont”; “Villepinte (Seine-et-Oise). Parc de la Noue”; “Gagny. L’étang de Maison-rouge. Groupe scolaire du Château-rouge. Cité du Château-rouge”), gives postal codes when available, and even notes when the postcards reference architects responsible for a building’s design (“Goussainville (95, Val-d’Oise). Les ‘Grandes Bornes’. Architecte: M. Lechauguette”). Most importantly, however, these pages also convey messages that inhabitants of these cités wrote by hand on the back of each card. Pernot gives voice to people—one might even imagine the témoins themselves—whose situation would normally have deprived them of one. These messages provide a fascinating look at daily life in places like La Noue Caillet in Bondy, Le Val-Fourré in Mantes-la-Jolie, and the Cité des 4000 in La Courneuve. While these developments have come to be associated with the violence, poverty, disaffected youth, unemployment, and generalized social malaise that plague many marginalized peripheral zones, the notes left by anonymous inhabitants on the postcards in Pernot’s collection, even those from the 1990s, are hardly indicative of these travails. On the contrary, each message is evocative of a more mundane existence. Many of these people seem content, inviting friends and family to visit. Some have used the postcards to jot down simple reminders, shopping lists, and basic equations. Still others contain replies to televised questionnaires promising prizes for those who submit the correct answers. Some describe moving into a new apartment. Some recount stays in the hospital. Children chime in: “In my borough, I have lots of friends and there are a lot of buildings.” Others point out what they see on the postcard’s other side, taking care to note where they reside: “Here is our cité with one of the towers where we live, on the seventh floor.” And when people are not showing concern for their own health or the health of others, the one constant, it seems, is that, again and again, the weather is horrible: “Here it always rains and is only 16 degrees.” Even though these cards were sent from different individuals across a wide spectrum of peri-urban territories (some as far away as Lyon), they all attest to the grand ensemble as a grand experiment in collective living. Pernot explores the fate of that experiment in a third section of Le grand ensemble, which is more than a détournement of postcards or an

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accumulation of archival iconography. Pernot has spoken of his interest in dialogism, of putting images in conversation with each other.67 And so, interspersed in the first half of the book, between pages of postcards and their enlargements, are 14 two-page, full-bleed, black-and-white stills from a series that Pernot calls Implosions.68 Taken from 2000–2006, and thus the oldest of the three intercalated sections that compose the book, these photographs document the systematic destruction of housing blocks that figure in areas depicted in the postcards themselves, mostly in the Greater Paris region (in Meaux, Mantes-la-Jolie, La Courneuve), but also in the département of the Loire (Roanne) and another from the Côte-d’Or (Dijon). If the postcards attest to the hopeful birth of the quixotic paradigm of the cité, and bear witness to the lives lived there, these pictures stand in stark contrast by marking a spectacular denouement. Each image that comprises the Implosion series captures the moment when a building begins to buckle under its own weight just seconds after detonation (see Figure 2.7). Shot from a safe distance away, often from an elevated vantage, the images evince a kind of structural beauty in the unfolding of these highly orchestrated and mediatized events.69 We discern the placement of the explosives at various target points in the structure and behold the hypnotizing pancaking effect as barres and tours come toppling down. Throughout, viewers are drawn to the plumes of dirt, dust, and debris that waft up from the site. Many images depict a massive cloud brought down to the surface of the earth. In one, an amorphous white nebula enshrouds almost the entire frame, swallowing most everything in its path, save for a cluster of trees that stand resolutely at the picture’s edge. If these photographs constitute an act of disappearance conducted by the state, these sites are not destined for resurrection in the same 67 Pernot, interview by Aurélie Charon, Les Masterclasses, France Culture, July 8, 2019, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-masterclasses/mathieupernot-par-aurelie-charon. 68 In the gallery or museum, Pernot exhibits these prints in large format, usually 100 by 130 cm. 69 The mediatization of many of these demolitions speaks to their status not simply as a crowd-pleasing amusement anchored in the real, or what Vanessa Schwartz might call a “spectacular reality,” but also as a highly visible statement of political and social intent. See Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

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way as the process recorded in Marc Petitjean’s chronicle of the plateau Beaubourg. Rather, Pernot’s photographs evoke the violence of erasure by unleashing a wave of architectural destruction that began in the mid-1970s and continued through the 1980s, at a time when opinion had shifted against the grands ensembles and saw them as a social experiment gone horribly wrong. The title of the series is significant because, as critic François Cheval defines it, an implosion is a “phenomenon that accompanies the crumpling of a structure and which is marked by a depression.”70 Unlike an explosion, which suggests an outward bursting of material, these pictures depict a controlled collapse of each building inward and onto itself. While this procedure is obviously done with safety in mind, one might also see in the implosion a metaphor for containment. “Depression,” then, not in the sense of a drop in air pressure, but rather in the sense of a widespread despondency, as if planners and politicians sought to prevent the spread of a generalized malaise that risked contaminating the larger metropolitan region. The clouds of dust and aerosolized debris suspended in the sky hint, however, that attempts to control the diffusion of the fallout are ultimately made in vain. While Pernot was too young to witness the earliest of these implosions (he was born when their first wave began, in 1970), most of his photographs were made in the early 2000s, when a new wave of planned destructions took hold. Documentary in style, his vision in these images is decidedly modern. Echoing Alfred Stieglitz’s series of wispy clouds formed naturally in the atmosphere in his Equivalents series from the 1920s, Pernot’s images emit a subtly abstract quality. But they also recall spectacularized documentation of the death of another famous social housing block, the Pruitt-Igoe development in Saint Louis, Missouri. Built in the 1950s to relieve that great American city of an increasingly dire housing crisis, the estate, consisting of 33 properties, was first inhabited in 1954. Remarkably, however, the Pruitt-Igoe project was near-abandoned and empty by the late 1960s as the buildings slowly degraded and turned into sites of poverty and crime. Their destruction, via implosion, in 1979 resonates with the destruction of the grands ensembles in that both represent “the products of the welfare state’s golden age [that are] disappearing even before their making has been

70 François Cheval, “Introduction,” in Mathieu Pernot. L’état des lieux (Paris: 779/Société française de photographie, 2004), 6.

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properly understood.”71 The dismantling of these dwellings signals a lack of will and an impotence on the part of the state to act constructively to reform how these places were conceived, built, and inhabited: The spectacular destruction of these towers and blocks, seen from afar, might appear like a symbolic form of reparation, a gesture by which a culture admits its failure. Upon closer inspection, it seems rather a gesture at once violent and inconsequential, one that avoids dealing with the actual problem and, at the same time, denies the very possibility of memory formation in a place where memory is already hard to come by and where it only really ever seems to crystallize in abandonment.72

The Implosion pictures consider how incongruous it is to destroy buildings that are so new, with no definitive plan to replace them. It is especially striking when viewed alongside the destruction that Marc Petitjean chronicled of buildings in the neighborhood around the rue Beaubourg, many of which were not decades but centuries old, in a neighborhood earmarked for major renewal. Le Grand ensemble’s deft juxtaposition of postcards celebrating the promise of mass public housing with images of their demise mere decades after their rise asks how the French state could put such a decisive end to something whose history has, to this day, yet to be written. Pernot’s project contributes to that history-in-the-making by rendering the meteoric life span of certain grands ensembles visible, all while making a memory of the moment of their disappearance flash before our eyes. From Le grand ensemble to Le grand Paris While Pernot’s work in Le grand ensemble is among the most well-known of photographic incursions into the built environment of Greater Paris, the banlieue and its topography have been a privileged object of reflection for other artists whose work not only adopts a similarly forensic approach to these spaces, but shapes the way we think about them. From Benoît Fougeirol’s photographs of the “zones urbaines sensibles,” or “urban renewal zones,” that provide another look at both the interior and exterior of buildings that have survived the programmed

71 Cupers, The Social Project, xiv. 72 Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Fin des dortoirs?”, in La Phrase urbaine (Paris: Seuil, 2013), 127.

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implosions charted by Pernot’s project73 to Laurent Kronental’s series on a more ambitious, extravagant, and postmodern form of peri-urban social housing that emerged in France in the 1970s and 1980s,74 and Claire Chevrier’s less brooding, and perhaps slightly more hopeful series on some of those same peri-urban public housing estates and other areas, like the plateau de Saclay, that offer new possibilities for a better future.75 To work by artists like Cyrille Weiner and Geoffroy Mathieu, both of whom explore the relatively untapped agricultural potential of the banlieue in series of pictures of the ways local communities have turned neglected sites on the margins of the periphery into flourishing pastures, lush gardens, and inviting spaces of neighborly conviviality.76 Thanks to work by these and other artists, the relationship between the city center and its environs, and the vision Parisians and the French more generally have of the periphery, continues to evolve. Perceptions are bound to change even further as local governments, working in consort with the state, move forward with a massive public works project aimed at further breaking down the divide between Paris and the banlieue by transforming the entire agglomeration into what has come to be known as the metropole of le Grand Paris. Introduced by the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, and inaugurated formally on January 1, 2016, this long-term development effort seeks to merge the city of Paris and its 2.3 million inhabitants with its petite couronne (“small crown,” or inner suburbs).77 Connected by a new network of rapid transit lines called the “Greater Paris Express,” the plan will add almost 5 million more residents and over 100 local authorities to form a 73 Benoît Fougeirol, Zus (Los Angeles, CA: X Artists’ Books, 2018). 74 See, for example, his photographs of the Quartier des Damiers in Courbevoie (1974–1976), the Étoiles d’Ivry in Ivry-sur-Seine (built in 1972), and the monumental Espaces d’Abraxas in Noisy-le-Grand, designed by renowned Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill in the early 1980s. While Kronental has not yet published his photographs in book form, readers can consult some of his work on his website, http://www.laurentkronental.com. 75 Claire Chevrier and Arlette Farge, Cheminement (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2017). 76 See Weiner’s book La Fabrique du pré (Trézélan: Filigranes, 2017) and Mathieu’s series Le Principe de ruralité – Grand Paris, 2015–2019, http://www. geoffroymathieu.com. 77 The project builds on an earlier “reconciliation” plan initiated in 2003 by the Minister of the City and Urban Renewal, Jean-Louis Borloo, who sought, though a variety of initiatives focused on developing the potential of the suburbs, to “bring the Republic back” to the banlieues.

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new megalopolis. While the project has its critics,78 supporters like the journalists behind the innovative Enlarge Your Paris initiative vaunt its benefits and channel Hemingway in their Guide des grands parisiens when they declare that “Greater Paris is a moveable feast […] Paris, today, is no longer the only heart that beats.”79 Adopting a more neutral position, perhaps no photographer to date has explored the state of place of la métropole du Grand Paris more than Camille Fallet. In The Greater Paris Landscape Manual, a series commissioned in 2011 by the Office of Culture Affairs for the Île-deFrance region, Fallet’s topophilic portrait of the banlieue writ large, a vision more vast in scope and abundant in topographic views than any other photographic series about the city and its surroundings made by a single photographer to date, elicits the richness and heterogeneity of the suburban vernacular, suggesting how rife with potential, and with potential pitfalls, the Greater Paris project actually is. Initially conceived as a tool for urbanists, a user’s guide of sorts that gives planners some visual purchase on a vast, topographically diverse, and unruly territory, the series was exhibited at the Académie d’Architecture in Paris in 2012. Fallet’s work has implications for other constituencies as well. To peruse the massive photobook-cum-portablearchive, which was published in 2012, an opus containing almost 1,000 photographs printed on just over 350 pages, is to move through the Greater Paris region accompanied by a dynamically peripatetic photographer with a keen eye for detail and an abiding interest in the quotidian.80 While places that one might usually associate with the banlieue certainly make an appearance here—notably in a subsection in 78 Thierry Paquot, for example, laments the current lack of a peri-urban imaginary with which its inhabitants could identify and connect, suggesting that extended métro lines and collaborative politics alone do not make for a shared sense of territoire. As Paquot writes, in order for it to succeed as a place welcoming of a diverse populace, and not merely as a technocratic “global city”: “Greater Paris has to stimulate dreams and activate the collective imaginary.” See “Un ‘machin’ en panne d’imaginaire?” Le Monde, May 8, 2009, https:// www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2009/05/08/un-machin-en-panne-d-imaginaire-parthierry-paquot_1190562_3232.html. 79 For more on Enlarge Your Paris, see https://enlargeyourparis.fr and https:// grandsparisiens.com/. A print edition of the Guide des grands parisiens was published by the Éditions Magasins généraux in 2018. 80 Camille Fallet, The Greater Paris Landscape Manual (Cergy: Les Ateliers internationaux de maîtrise d’œuvre urbaine, 2012).

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the sequence called “concrete city” devoted to various tours and barres of social housing in cités from around Île-de-France—the scope of Fallet’s inquiry is much more wide-ranging. It includes everything from middle-class housing developments that abound in the various “new towns” that were built in the 1970s (Figure 2.8), and shopping centers and playgrounds that cater to inhabitants of these suburbs, to industrial sites, office parks, and the transportation hub surrounding the airport at Roissy. A small section of the book is devoted to riverscapes of the Seine, Marne, and Oise, another to the contours and textures of local streets and national roads, and yet another to restaurant franchises, like Buffalo Grill, that pepper the landscape. Infrastructural elements proliferate. Pictures of water towers and grain silos pay subtle homage to the work of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, while images of high-tension power lines, highways, bridges, barriers, tunnels, nuclear reactors, and even oil rigs suggest just how much the city of Paris relies on the periphery’s power grid and transportation network. At the same time, Fallet does not shy away from natural features like streams, trees, parkland, and areas at the side of the highway where native grasses and wildflowers grow. A two-page spread of a wheat field at dawn, shot at the limit of the Parc Naturel Régional du Vexin Français northwest of Paris, even features a deer buck posing proudly in the center of the photographer’s frame (Figure 2.9). Throughout, Fallet’s interest in architecture and planning are manifest, most notably in a short sequence on several avant-garde social housing projects. Not unlike the work by Laurent Kronental that I mentioned above, Fallet’s photographs position some of these sites, like the Tours Aillaud in Nanterre, as iconic examples of cultural patrimony worthy of preservation.81 Skimming through the photobook’s pages, one senses that, for Fallet, no site is off limits. Even empty lots and spaces left “blank” on the most detailed of maps get their due. Fallet’s pictures stand out in their unpretentious aesthetic. The seemingly casual and often insouciant approach the artist takes to making photographs corresponds readily with the completely unadorned nature of the spaces and places represented here. Whether shot with a view camera or a smartphone, in color or in black and white, from street 81 These public housing towers, built near La Défense in the mid-1970s, are also known, thanks to their color scheme, as the Tours Nuages (Cloud Towers), a detail that Fallet’s photograph subtly acknowledges by capturing a wispy cirrus floating in the top left corner and surrounded by an otherwise bright blue sky.

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level or positioned on high from an upper floor of a nearby building or perched on an elevated vantage looking down and over the land, the hues and tones are, for the most part, flat. Perspectives vary, from close-ups of roadside flora to wide-angle vistas that capture miles of terrain and sky. And if each image is clearly composed with a professional eye, the photographs do not aestheticize the places they represent as much as they constitute an attempt, thanks to the sheer number of them on display here, to exhaust Greater Paris in all its heterogeneity. At the same time, while the layout dynamically evokes the spatial and architectural diversity to be found on the Parisian periphery—images appear on the page or gallery wall in a range of orientations, focal lengths, styles, and sizes—a logic of iteration and enumeration provide a strikingly cohesive experience for viewers perusing the book’s hundreds of pages. Lists and categories structure various sections. The table of contents, which organizes the photographs into 18 different classes of objects, topographic features, and ideas—from “landmarks,” “trademarks,” and “flow” to “franchise,” “roughcast city,” and “portals and railings”— attests to the wide scope of a project that seeks to capture as thorough a sense of place as possible, all while hinting at how impossible a task Fallet’s attempt at exhausting this place actually is. Distinguishing itself from much of the work discussed in this chapter, and in this book, The Greater Paris Landscape Manual is keenly attuned to the way Parisians and inhabitants of the banlieue alike regularly experience the peri-urban territory in motion. Many of Fallet’s photographs evoke moving through these spaces—in transit on foot, by car, or on the train—as an alternative way to understanding their import. This is notable, for example, in the sequence entitled “cars” that recalls Canadian photographer Jeff Wall’s own Landscape Manual, a 1969 photo-essay that includes a series of black-and-white photographs of Vancouver taken from an automobile, sometimes while moving. One form of movement that is crucial to understanding Fallet’s approach is, precisely, a movement of approach. Many pictures, notably in the sequence he calls “landmarks,” constitute views of well-known monuments, those that are easily visible from afar. Here, however, Fallet depicts symbolic sites as if they were seen from a moving vehicle approaching the city from one of the many conduits that branch out from the ring road. Anyone who has ever visited Paris and driven into the city from the outskirts will recognize, for example, the way certain monuments come briefly into view. Here, however, Fallet’s distanced photographic vantage prevents us from ever seeing those icons from

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nearby. Not unlike Eustachy Kossakowski’s series 6 mètres avant, with which I began this chapter, The Greater Paris Landscape Manual keeps viewers on the outside looking in. However, if Kossakowski’s images anxiously hint at the difficulty of access and the tension it causes, especially for new arrivals seeking to make their mark on the city, Fallet’s series indulges in the margins. His photographs get close to the city only to turn and circumnavigate around it in a gesture designed to give the greater Paris periphery the gaze he feels it deserves. Paying meticulous attention to areas neglected by popular culture, sites that seem to undermine the storied ground of Paris proper, The Greater Paris Landscape Manual frequently offers an oblique view of the capital city. This off-kilter angle is established, notably, in the book’s opening sequence, entitled “wide scale city,” that cleverly places central Paris in a position peripheral to the banlieue, its major monuments figuring as mere background. This divergent perspective is also deployed to great effect on a two-page panorama placed almost directly at the center of Fallet’s book, suggesting its status as keystone for the entire Landscape Manual project (Figure 2.10). Here, in an image taken from the D316 road as one enters Villiers-le-Bel, a vantage situated on a high point of the Plaine Saint-Denis north-northwest just outside of the city, viewers will notice three familiar forms that signal the presence of Paris off in the distance. Yet if we discern in the background the Sacré-Cœur basilica atop the Montmartre hill, the Montparnasse skyscraper, and the Eiffel Tower—among the capital’s most iconic, and tallest, landmarks—the photograph discourages us from dwelling upon them. Unlike the view that Robert Doisneau and Blaise Cendrars famously chose to grace the cover of their 1949 photo-textual portrait of La Banlieue de Paris, in which the Eiffel Tower, clearly visible from just outside the city limits, authoritatively dominates the frame from top to bottom,82 in Fallet’s photograph these monoliths, miles away, seem out of focus, faintly visible and somewhat masked, as if floating on the horizon, veiled by a thick layer of urban haze. They are, quite literally for the photograph, a kind of afterthought, so close, but really so far away. Inspired instead by Walker Evans’s famous images from 1935 and 1936 that provide a similar perspective looking down the streets into Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, thanks to its layered composition Fallet’s photograph focuses its gaze most clearly on the foreground nearby: 82 See Blaise Cendrars and Robert Doisneau, La Banlieue de Paris (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1949).

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a billboard for a local McDonalds and other commercial signage, a modest home, lampposts that line the roadway, circulating traffic, and a concrete median that eventually draws our regard first to the middle ground and public housing blocks in the commune of Sarcelles and, eventually, toward the icons of central Paris farther afield. Fallet’s singular visualization of Paris Orbital thus resonates with that term’s astronomic signification and seems to understand the periphery in the way speakers of Old French did, when the word periferie referred to the atmosphere around the earth. Indeed, this view of central Paris glimpsed from afar while orbiting around it might remind viewers of images of our world seen from outer space. As if to suggest that, for inhabitants of these suburbs, the capital of France might as well be on a distant planet. If I began this chapter with a discussion of what Paris represents to France, namely the axis around which the French world turns, I end it with a representation of the capital that makes it seem if not light years away, then at least very far off, dwarfed by the geographic extent of the region that surrounds it and shown to occupy what The Greater Paris Landscape Manual posits as a faintly visible speck in the increasingly expansive universe of the peri-urban territoire.

chapter three

Mission: France Mission: France

To live is to live locally and know first of all the place one is in. —Edward Casey1

The phenomenon of the French photographic mission, whereby a collective of artists charged with documenting the nation’s shared common spaces traverse the territory with cameras in tow, has begun to attract the attention of scholars.2 And with good reason. For the history of French photography has been marked by the preponderance of group-based projects. From the famed Mission héliographique of 1851 to the increasingly appreciated Mission photographique de la DATAR of 1984–1989. And from lesser known initiatives like the Mission photographique transmanche, sponsored by the Centre national de la photographie of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and focusing, from 1998–2005, on the regional impact of the construction of the Channel Tunnel; or the Mission du Conservatoire du littoral, charged since the mid-1980s with apprising the public of the wealth and fragility of natural resources along France’s numerous coastlines; to even more inclusive programs that gather, disseminate, and reflect upon the work of amateur photographers, 1 Edward Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), 18. 2 Key scholarship on the history and current state of photographic missions in France includes Raphaële Bertho’s groundbreaking study, La Mission photographique de la DATAR; de Mondenard’s La Mission héliographique; and Méaux’s essay on photography and the French national territory, Géo-photographies.

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like the FNAC-sponsored photo competition C’était Paris en 1970, or Mon paysage: Le paysage préféré des français, a project created by the French Ministry for the Environment in 1992 in which French residents submitted some 9,000 images of places they held dear.3 It seems clear that these ventures, in the breadth of their coverage and in the spirit of their imagination, have much to tell us about the role that landscape plays in the construction of France’s topographical imaginary. They also suggest how central is the representation of ordinary places to conversations about development, politics, ecology, and identity in modern and contemporary France. The prevalence of missions photographiques testifies to the extent to which French cultural, administrative, and commercial institutions have joined forces, and have been doing so since photography’s infancy, to support documentary landscape photography as a vehicle for thinking deeply about the past, present, and future shape of the nation. What follows is an appraisal of two substantial photographic missions that set out to engage these issues and, in doing so, render the physical contours of the Hexagon intelligible in compelling new ways. While the Observatoire national photographique du paysage (or OPP), inaugurated in 1991, aims to sensitize the national public to the impact of topographic change through a rigorously implemented procedure of professional rephotography, by which series of pictures are made in the same sites under the same conditions at regular intervals over a period of time, the cohort of photographers united since 2011 under the moniker France(s) territoire liquide (FTL) has, with the blessing of the organizers of the DATAR’s original mission, produced a more prismatic picture of the national territory. Though they differ greatly in their approach to France’s diverse territories, both the OPP and the FTL privilege sites off the beaten path to provide a more nuanced vision of France that challenges dominant conceptions and clichés, in the rhetorical and graphic senses of the word, of the nation as a whole. Both the OPP and FTL seek to visualize what Stéphane Gerson calls the “infranational territory”4 of France: its small towns and borderlands, from isolated regional parks and roadside parking lots to out-of-the way places, seemingly insignificant spaces, and other local landscapes adjusting 3 For a sustained discussion of the C’était Paris en 1970 project, see chapter five in Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History. 4 Stéphane Gerson, “Une France locale: The Local Past in Recent French Scholarship,” French Historical Studies 26:3 (Summer 2003), 540.

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to commercial and industrial development, demographic shifts, and ecological change. As such, they project an image of a nation that continues to evolve in the modern era. Not unlike work by the artists that I have discussed in the preceding chapters, both collective efforts picture a landscape that is perpetually becoming, in process and “en devenir,” as Fabienne Costa and Danièle Méaux have put it.5 What sets them apart from these other photographic series, however, is how the OPP and FTL mobilize the many individual talents of their diverse roster of participants to convey a shared idea of France marked by often understated but nevertheless visible expressions of multiplicity, diversity, and constant mutation rather than by a sense of universal fixity, unity, and uniformity that one might expect from photographic commissions whose very titles elicit aspirations that are national in scope. French Landscapes, Photographed and Rephotographed The ground rules for the OPP were established in 1989, just as the DATAR mission was officially coming to a close. Two years later, in 1991, with the backing of the Ministry of the Environment (which would later become the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development, and Energy), confirmed art photographers, masters of documentary photography like Sophie Ristelhueber, Gilbert Fastenaekens, and Thibaut Cuisset, among others, began working with various municipalities on the first commissions, respectively, in the Parc du Pilat in southeastern France, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, and in the Côtes-d’Armor in Brittany.6 In close collaboration with local partners responsible for the preservation and conservation of natural regional parks, and for the development of municipal land, each of the 14 inaugural photographers selected approximately 40 views to be photographed regularly, which is to say once every year or two, though some series are occasionally updated less 5 Fabienne Costa and Danièle Méaux, eds, Paysages en devenir (Saint-Étienne: Presse Universitaire de Saint-Étienne, 2012). 6 Given their familiarity with the French landscape, and considering the way they crafted their own vision of the national territory in individual contributions to the DATAR mission in the 1980s, it is not surprising that the organizers of the OPP would call upon artists like the three I mention here to participate in this new venture. This does not mean, however, that all OPP photographers are alumni of the DATAR mission. On the contrary, most of them are not.

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frequently than that. For the project’s organizers, the images produced would serve as a tool to study how rural, urban, and peri-urban spaces evolve over time, so that future transformations, anticipated or not, natural or human-made, could be better managed or implemented. At its heart, the project was destined to serve a civic function by helping local governments monitor the inevitable mutation of conditions on the ground and allocate resources to various public works projects. Researchers from fields as diverse as forestry, agronomy, ecology, and geography have also made use of the OPP’s corpus of views. But the reliance on the participation of a cohort of confirmed art photographers instructed to bring their own vision to bear on the landscape also attests to the organizers’ imperative to produce more than a set of planning data to be analyzed and potentially acted upon. As head of the OPP steering committee François Letourneux writes, in a gesture not unlike the one made by the organizers of the DATAR mission who also sought to move beyond a purely technocratic appreciation of the territory, “While there exists ample statistical and numerical data—one might call it vertical data—that allows one to study the evolution and inhabitation patterns of the land and the movement of populations, this does not take into account the reality of the landscape and the way we feel or see it.”7 That the OPP’s organizers recognized how changes to the landscape can be viewed and felt subjectively suggests that the project, from its inception, was not simply geared toward policy decisions that would shape the material contours of the territory but, perhaps even more importantly, toward promoting the power of photography, and of art more generally, to inform the way people see and experience place. To facilitate the rephotographic process, coordinators of the observatoire devised a series of specific constraints to guide the photographers in their annual retakes. Detailed regulations concerning camera angles and focal lengths, methods of localizing the exact location from which to shoot, and rules about when to photograph these views, and under what kinds of meteorological conditions, establish a sense of uniformity to all the images produced.8 From the outset, photographers were 7 François Letourneux, “Preface,” in Séquences/Paysages. Revue de l’Observatoire photographique du paysage 1997 (Paris: Ministère de l’environnement – Hazan, 1997), 2. 8 While the OPP’s photographers were invited to subscribe to Letourneux’s directive to invest their work with hints of affect and sensibility, and to bring their own vision and aesthetic to bear on their respective itineraries, technical constraints

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charged with respecting the rule of accessibility, such that each viewpoint could be easily reached year after year. They were also asked to keep meticulous notes, not simply to help locate the same point of view when a pin on a map would not suffice, but to assist localities in identifying and assessing modifications to the landscape in the interim. To this day, a total of 18 observatoires have been established in metropolitan France, while two others are based in the islands La Réunion and Martinique. The project continues to manage almost 1,000 viewpoints. And while some photographers like Raymond Depardon and Sophie Ristelhueber abandoned their missions well before the initial three-year term came to an end, others like Thierry Girard, who works exclusively on itinerary number 11 in the Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord, have been participating annually for decades (Girard’s commission began with the second wave of invitations to participate, in 1997).9 The OPP is a rephotographic survey project that echoes other important remake initiatives like Mark Klett’s famous Second View series from the 1970s and 1980s, a photographic mission that revisited sites around the great American West photographed a century earlier by canonical figures like Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins.10 In this context, given the more than 100-year time span separating O’Sullivan and Watkins’s geographical survey and Klett’s new views, one might also think of Christopher Rauschenberg’s similarly retrospective rephotographic series from 1997 and 1998, Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugène Atget’s Paris.11 Of course, photographers who participate in the OPP work with a much more condensed time frame, returning to make new images repeatedly, sometimes every year or every few years. With necessarily limit—without entirely quashing—the kind of artistic expression that emerges in the earlier DATAR mission and, as readers will see further on, in FTL. 9 While individual artists have published work that emerged from their OPP assignments in book form, two collective publications have also appeared. See the two volumes of Séquences/Paysages. Revue de l’Observatoire photographique du paysage, published in 1997 and 2000. 10 See Mark Klett, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Process (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). Readers may also be interested in Klett’s third iteration of this series, Third View, Second Sights, published in book form in 2004 and available online at http://www.thirdview.org. 11 A volume containing Rauschenberg’s images printed alongside Atget’s shots of the same sites was published as Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugène Atget’s Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).

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the exception of artists who take over an itinerary from a colleague, all OPP photographers are responsible for the “original” views upon which each subsequent picture is based. That said, the concept of an original image of a landscape in constant evolution, as part of a project designed to document evidence of change over time, does not seem quite useful or apropos. While there may be a particular time of day, or sequence of minutes, where the lighting and meteorological conditions align perfectly, there is no “decisive moment” in the kind of rigorously structured documentary rephotography of the landscape that the OPP represents.12 In this respect, the OPP has perhaps more in common with a project such as the German Archive of Reality commission that invited eight photographers to document East German towns and landscapes prior to unification (or reunification, as it were) in the 1980s, and then asked the same artists to return to the original sites to photograph them afresh after the great “turn” (what the Germans refer to as die Wende) in 1989. That said, the initial intent of the German project was not rephotographic at all. The photographers were only commissioned later to return to the sites they had originally shot years before. The French venture does not quite evoke the ruins of time and the trauma of history laid bare in the interlude between each successive repetition in the German commission, fortuitously triggered by the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.13 If there is any trauma evident in the OPP series, it is the anguish sometimes associated with modern forms of development, what French technocrats and politicians call l’aménagement du territoire. Both trauma and anguish, however, are terms that, to my mind, seem too fraught. Rather, OPP photographs are often suggestive of a mild discomfort, or a pang. As one commentator has written, “The French who love their landscapes are worried about their future.”14 The micro-level changes to the terrain evident in many

12 I refer here to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s term from his book of the same name (Images à la sauvette, in French), originally published in 1952 and recently republished as The Decisive Moment (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014). 13 For a more thorough discussion of the German commissions see Donna M.F. Brett, “The Uncanny Return: Documenting Place in Postwar German Photography,” Photographies 3:1 (2010), 7–22. 14 Caroline Mollie-Stefulesco, “Huit ans d’Observatoire,” in Séquences/ Paysages. Revue de l’Observatoire photographique du paysage 2000, ed. MollieStefulesco and Daniel Quesney (Brussels: ARP Éditions, 2000), 4.

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of the OPP photographs subtly hint at this potentially bothersome state of affairs. Take, for example, the sequence that photographer Gérard Dalla Santa made every spring, in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2002, at the entrance to the village of Les Valentins in the Parc Naturel Régional de la Haute Vallée de Chevreuse about 45 minutes southwest of Paris (Figure 3.1). The succession of images chronicles the slow subdivision of a bucolic, if perfectly unremarkable site. Initially, in 1997, viewers (not to mention visitors to this parcel in the commune of Bullion) would have confronted a traditionally rural space in which a diversity of vegetation, a wash house, and a church steeple are visible. Over the course of five years, a house and freestanding two-car garage are erected, a bland concrete cinder-block wall encloses the property, and, perhaps most egregiously, the view from the road of the town’s historic wash house and church becomes almost entirely obstructed. And, just like that, private space impinges on the common, shared space of the territoire. As architect and member of the steering committee of this itinerary Cécile Lauras writes in a short preface to Dalla Santa’s work, for those who made their homes in the Vallée de Chevreuse a long time ago, views like this one, along with many others in Dalla Santa’s corpus, are hard to stomach: “One would have preferred the fence to be seen from a greater distance, the pole placed outside the frame, or the house take up less space.”15 Unlike comparative rephotographs that, like the German Archive of Reality project, come in sets of two, and which, in the “duality of absence and presence and the contrast of before and after,” hold “time and space, events and occurrences in limbo,”16 the sequential nature of the OPP photographs expand outward and explode the sensation of abeyance to privilege a more dynamic and open-ended relationship to time. These are not before and after shots. Instead, they represent an evolving succession of “nows.” Each image in the sequence lays bare the status of this site in the context of that moment. At the same time, one photograph seems to anticipate the next, encouraging viewers to wonder how the view, let alone these places themselves, will continue to be transformed, for better or for worse. They also consider ways localities have already and may continue to intervene to shape 15 Cécile Lauras, “Aux portes de Paris, l’Arcadie?” in Séquences/Paysages. Revue de l’Observatoire photographique du paysage 2000, ed. Caroline Mollie-Stefulesco and Daniel Quesney (Brussels: ARP Editions, 2000), 36–7. 16 Brett, “The Uncanny Return,” 13.

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these changes even more, not only in the specific sites depicted, but in other comparable spaces across the region and, by association, across the nation.17 When considered collectively, images like these from the OPP—and there are almost 2,000 of them—not only provide a visual inventory of a necessarily limited cross-section of the national territory at the turn of the twenty-first century, they forge pathways for thinking about future fluctuations and for anticipating responses to more changes to come.18 The OPP is a measured project. While not entirely exhaustive, it is one of the most rigorously Cartesian, which is to say methodical and exacting ways of making so many photographs, on such a grand scale, that has ever been produced in France. Pictures like these attest to how deliberately the OPP’s organizers conceive of the nation’s varied topography, not only from a quasi-scientific perspective, but from an archival one as well. All the photographs produced are destined to end up in the archive, which takes the form of a digital database available online.19 And what is an archive if not, as architectural historian Nana Last writes, “an operative procedure undertaken to insure that the knowledge of the subject of the archive can be completely mapped and collected so as to make its meaning transparent.”20 OPP photographs, while sensitive to photographic form, are also uniformly knowledgeable about the landscape. To be sure, while all photographs 17 In a document produced to track the progress of Dalla Santa’s commission, organizers of this observatoire clearly learned something from these photographs: namely, that “a more rigorous study of the plantings and fences would have perhaps allowed us to avoid the complete closing off of this view.” See page 91 in the booklet available here: http://www.parc-naturel-chevreuse.fr/une-autre-vie-sinvente-ici/ amenagement-et-paysages/observatoire-des-paysages. 18 Dalla Santa stopped participating in this observatoire in 2002. In 2008, however, Google seems to have taken over where Dalla Santa left off. While the quality of the artist’s images far surpasses those produced by the 360-degree camera mounted on the roof of their Street View car, Google’s commitment to updating their online maps has produced an archive of shots taken at the same location over time (in April, May, and September 2008, in January 2009, and again in October 2016). 19 Curious readers may access all of the photographs produced so far on the OPP website maintained by the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development, and Energy: https://terra.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/observatoire-photo-paysage/ home/. 20 Nana Last, “Thomas Struth: From Image to Archive to Matrix,” Praxis: Journal of Writing + Building 7 (2005), 82.

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contain information, these images are designed to make that information apparent, and in an impartial way. As historian Robin Kelsey notes, throughout history state-sponsored photographic missions have been designed with a distinctly ideological position in mind. For Kelsey, the geological surveys of the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, produced an archive of images that serve to represent the state and, perhaps more importantly, glorify its territorial holdings.21 The observatoire, on the other hand, is driven by a more utilitarian imperative. We cannot help but scrutinize pictures like these, perhaps because they challenge us to recognize how useful they may be, and what they could be useful for. Dalla Santa’s sequence in the Vallée de Chevreuse, for example, calls out to viewers to glean a kind of topographic awareness that is discernible, especially, in the relation established between successive images, and whose value lies in its ability to suggest what municipalities get right and wrong. As the landscape is seen in these images to open over time, subtle and sometimes quite meaningful micro-level changes crop up from one picture to the next, allowing viewers to consider a host of best (or worst) practices for urban, suburban, and rural planning. The logic of sequentiality that makes the roman photo a narrative genre is clearly operative here as well. For all the information they convey, these images have a story to tell. While evidence of relatively harmless, and often entirely sensible technocratic decision-making processes is legion in these photographs—look how a useful street sign has been planted here, or how a paved road replaces a dirt path over there—the distinctions that emerge from one photograph to the next, however subtle, encourage viewers to consider the possibility of more consequential, macro-level shifts that these changes could herald. At the same time, pictures of deforestation, land clearing, and urban demolition to make way for the construction of new homes, office parks, or high-speed railway lines are just as common in these collections as images that document the positive effects of decent municipal governance and, in some cases, sound environmental stewardship. Diverging from another important photographic precursor, namely the “New Topographics” trend of vernacular landscape photography that emerged in the United States in the mid-1970s—and whose practitioners are more captious in their attitude toward development and to what the curator of the famous 21 Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.

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1975 group exhibition called the “man-altered landscape”22—the OPP photographs strive to remain neutral in their judgments, leaving room for viewers to come to their own conclusions. Rather than entirely condemning the potentially negative impact that much new construction implies, the OPP invites viewers to consider the impermanence of space, its unfinished state, its status, as geographer Doreen Massey calls it, “as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.”23 As if to say that the aménagement of municipal land is not simply natural, but perhaps even as necessary and as inevitable as the evolution of seemingly more wild landscapes that viewers will surely notice—thanks, in part, to the kind of narrative sequentiality that I mention above—in images from the observatoire of “natural” sites that exhibit seemingly little or no manipulation by human hands or industry. When Thierry Girard writes that “the photographer does not judge, but his rigorous, documented work activates our questioning of the landscape,” he expresses the larger ethos at work in the mission as a whole.24 Les Frances Not unlike the OPP, FTL turns to the topographic as a way to make sense of, and to make visible, what Bernard Comment calls “the contemporary realities” of France.25 Or, to put it another way, as Jean-Christophe Bailly does in his introduction to the volume published, tellingly, in Seuil’s Fiction et Cie series, the FTL project asks how photographers might not simply capture the reality of the territory, but move beyond representation to make French space “hum.”26 For the late Jérôme Brézillon, one of the four founders of the “liquid territory” conceit, such a task could only be tackled collectively, by a collaborative of committed artists united around a shared mission. With that in mind, in 2011, Brézillon and his colleagues Frédéric Delangle, Cédric Delsaux, 22 See William Jenkins, ed., The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, exhibition catalogue (Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1975). 23 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9. 24 Thierry Girard, Vosges du Nord (Toulouse: Les Imaginayres, 2004), 83. 25 Bernard Comment, “Preface,” in France(s) territoire liquide, ed. Bernard Comment (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 4. 26 Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Introduction,” in France(s) territoire liquide, ed. Bernard Comment (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 16.

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and Patrick Messina began organizing a loose federation of some of France’s strongest confirmed or up-and-coming photographers whose work shares an affinity for the landscape. Though lacking in corporate sponsorship, the FTL group was nevertheless backed by the French Ministry of Culture and the DATAR. Organizers of the DATAR’s earlier photographic mission approved of the relative autonomy given to FTL participants to play with the narrative, rhetorical, and fictional potentiality of French landscape photography. FTL participants also benefited from strength in numbers and a professional figurehead in well-known English photography curator Paul Wombell, who was recruited to select the definitive roster of participants and provide a sense of intellectual coherence to the mission. The goal: to produce a corpus of work that would serve as an appraisal of the various geographies, real and imagined, of contemporary France; to investigate ways photography can be called upon to probe and define what Wombell calls “the principal traits of French identity and territory at the dawn of the twenty-first century”;27 and to stake a claim for the pertinence of a brand of contemporary photography from France in a milieu and a marketplace for art dominated by practitioners primarily from the United States and, especially, Germany. While the 43 photographers who contributed to the Territoire Liquide project are, like the members of the OPP collective, invested in the evolution of landscape and attentive to spaces in a state of seemingly constant evolution—as Bailly writes in his preface, “the only thing we can be sure about is that, made as it is of distinct or indistinct places and sites, [the territory] is not stable; it evolves continuously”—compared with the strict architecture required by the OPP, the collection of images the FTL produced is positively unbridled.28 Liberated from the systematic directives laid out in an exhaustive set of documents like logbooks, analytical rubrics, and production specifications by which all OPP participants are contracted to abide, and free to mobilize imaging and production technologies of their own choosing, the artists working under the auspices of the FTL were encouraged to see the spaces and places that comprise the French national territory as a boundless playground of sorts: “Instead of a fixed form, a movement. Instead of a concise sense of identity, a texture of flux and slippage, whose territory 27 Paul Wombell, “FTL,” http://www.francesterritoireliquide.fr/ftl-par-paulwombell.html. 28 Bailly, “Introduction,” 10.

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would be the surface of welcome openness and play.”29 Each FTL photographer was given the prerogative to conjure up his or her own contribution as they wished. The result is a constellation of pictures of many different styles, from those that privilege a documentary mode to others that are more visionary and even fanciful in scope. This stylistic variety is well suited to providing a visual appraisal of the topographic state of France, all the while gesturing toward a practice that is more personal, more sensuous, at times more demonstrative and forthcoming in its critique, and more formally and conceptually diverse than any French photographic mission to date. Information, while surely present, as it is in all photographs, is more implicit here. Unlike the OPP, the knowledge these photographs impart is not intended as a planning tool for local officials and the municipalities over which they preside, but as an intellectual nudge designed to “shake up the perceptions”30 about France, or rather about France(s), which is to say about the diverse spaces, mentalities, constituencies, and ways of seeing the nation and its metaphorically fluid territories. While OPP images are often displayed publicly, and while FTL pictures are quite discerning in their approach, in general, France(s) territoire liquide privileges the aesthetic of the art gallery over that of the archive. The artist statements that articulate the thinking behind each series, and which run anywhere from a paragraph to a page or two, are therefore not simply procedural records of how these photographs were planned and produced, but self-reflexive ruminations on gesture, technique, process, affect, and connection to a community of like-minded image makers and to a particular place. Some series offer personal reflections on place, like Geoffroy de Boismenu’s images of “intimate territories” in Brittany that reflect conversations the artist had with people he interviewed on site, and whose comments are reproduced alongside the images themselves. Another plays with mirrors that mimic seeing things from an entirely different perspective, akin to looking at the world through a set of eyes in the back of our heads (Guillaume Amat). One artist seeks out oneiric creatures that haunt the Corsican countryside at night (Jean-Philippe Carré-Matei), while another appropriates internet snapshots of local real estate for sale, turning ephemeral views of private space into works of art meant to be contemplated in public on white gallery walls (Olivier Nord). Several artists represent a poetic or even 29 Bailly, “Introduction,” 12. 30 Comment, “Préface,” 4.

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phantasmatic vision of well-known or historically significant French spaces. I am thinking here, for example, of Marie Sommer’s stirring black-and-white shots of the fortresses that cap the Frioul islands a few miles off the coast of Marseille, or Ambroise Tézenas’s series of Parisian tourist sites made with long exposure times (of 30 to 45 minutes) that effectively dematerialize the throngs of visitors in front of the Moulin Rouge, the Opéra Garnier, and the Sacré-Cœur into faintly visible, wispy ghosts. Still others picture some of France’s most off-the-beaten-path and vernacular landscapes to engage with topics of great national and universal urgency. Emmanuelle Blanc’s series, Cartographie d’une extrême occupation humaine, to cite one striking example, reflects humankind’s role in transforming and exploiting the environment (Figure 3.2). Blanc’s incredibly rich mountainscapes, taken in the Alps at altitudes ranging from 690 to 2,460 meters above sea level, at first conjure images of the Romantic sublime. Bathed in clouds and shadows, viewers might recall Shelley’s vision of the summit of Mont Blanc, a “desert peopled by storms alone.”31 Whether shot from a low angle looking up, or from on high looking down, or straight on from a cross-valley vantage point, Blanc’s pictures suggest that these inspiring and often awe-inducing mountains—solid, stately, and occasionally snow-capped—have been here for millennia. They will certainly outlast us all. Looking closely, however, Blanc’s photographs subtly reveal that they are perhaps less meditative reflections on the beauty of high-mountain landscape than they are about the modernization of post-war France’s infrastructure. Keen viewers who take the time to scan Blanc’s pictures will remark that if the images are conscious of geologic time and Alpine orogeny, they also reveal traces of much more recent anthropogenic activity in the faintly visible presence of electrical transformers, transmission towers, and seemingly diaphanous power and communication cables perched upon, and running over and through these massive ranges.32 One might ask by what incredible acrobatic feats of engineering 31 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamoni” (1817), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45130/mont-blanc-lines-writtenin-the-vale-of-chamouni. 32 In this respect, Blanc’s pictures recall work by the “new topographics” photographers that I mention above and which often depicts, sometimes overtly and other times less so, power and telephone lines strung across the landscape in the developing American West in the 1970s.

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did France’s national electric company place these structures in such hostile and often precarious positions? Indeed, the last image of the series represents a tower and transformer perched perilously on a snow-covered rocky outcrop. That these constructions are dwarfed not merely by the peaks that surround them but by a mass of glaciated ice (frozen, for now anyway) that occupies half of the frame raises questions about what the presence of these structures means for the current state and future of the ecosystem. What role does industry play in shaping the environment that it relies on to profit? Can we even speak of wild or “natural” places in the Anthropocene? In his own series of photographs taken in the environs of Calais, Julien Chapsal brings viewers’ attentions back down to sea level. His images of sites near the infamous refugee camp, the so-called “jungle of Calais,” explore transitory spaces that hint at the experience of migrants in France surviving at the extreme margins. An improvised path through the woods does not quite lead anywhere other than to a patch of brambles, albeit one bathed in light. A rocky outcrop—the presence of sand suggests a site near the port or the camp in Sangatte—presents itself as an obstacle course waiting to be scrambled over. Though one could also imagine refugees from Africa and the Middle East taking refuge in the gaps between boulders that seem large enough to accommodate someone looking for a place to hide, or sleep. Yet another trail winds its way up a dune through dense seagrass blowing in the wind. This image leads the eye toward what may be a view, perhaps, of the sea and, a mere 80 km away, of a kind of promised land that inhabitants of the jungle can only hope to attain by stowing themselves away on a boat or, more likely, by smuggling themselves aboard the back of a cargo truck headed to Dover via the Channel Tunnel. Here we stumble upon a breach in a chain-link fence. An adult could squeeze through this mangy pass-through but would have to take care to avoid scraping up against the three layers of taut barbed wire above. There we scan a pair of drab and soiled jeans left in the dirt. And in another image scraps of cardboard (likely used to provide support for sleeping) dot a footpath cut through the shrubs, while a dirty old mattress, a jerry can, and subtle hints of red fabric (a chair? a tent?) hardly visible behind the bushes point to the presence of a makeshift campsite (Figure 3.3). Someone has been here, occupying this restricted patch of land. One gets the feeling that if the photographer’s presence—or a police patrol—has scared the current occupant(s) away, others could appear at any time to claim this space as their own.

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Shot in broad daylight, often depicting a blue sky overhead, the pictures invite viewers to inspect the terrain for clues, equating our gaze with the mechanisms of surveillance and detection that the state deploys to control the movement of thousands of displaced people who transit “illegally” through this territory that has ostensibly become the scene of a crime. That these marginalized noncitizens never appear in Chapsal’s photographs effectively strips them of their agency. It denies them the ability to look back at the camera, to meet our gaze and thus participate in the photographic act by which, according to Ariella Azoulay, they could more directly address and even refuse “the institutional structures that have abandoned and injured them, that continue to shirk responsibility toward these subjects.”33 In this sense, the photographs seem to implicate the viewer in the French government’s ineffectual campaign to manage what it considers a threat to public order, making us complicit in the complacent neglect of migrants whose suffering goes largely unacknowledged. I would suggest, however, that this does not necessarily foreclose our capacity to be moved by what we do see in Chapsal’s images. For in their efforts to sensitize spectators to the perilous spatial and material conditions that migrants in France are forced to negotiate, and to just how precarious and vulnerable their lives are in these conditions, the photographs also embrace a humanitarian logic of compassion. Chapsal’s potent consideration of landscapes marked by the migrant experience—suggested in pictures of sites that, void of people, are, as Marielle Macé reminds us, nevertheless brimming with life34—evokes what it might be like to transit through these hazardous places and live, if only for a moment, in the refugees’ shoes. The photographs thus elicit a disquieting but also very powerful “slippage”35 between one kind of spectatorship anchored in what Azoulay calls our “civic duty”36 toward dispossessed noncitizens and another that invites us to empathize with 33 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 18. 34 Marielle Macé, Sidérer, considérer. Migrants en France, 2017 (Paris: Verdier, 2017), 41. 35 I borrow the term “slippage” from Paul Lowe, who argues that when the “unexpected tropes of meaning of the image are disturbed” in a photograph, it facilitates for the viewer a deeper form of active engagement and interpretation. See Lowe, “Traces of Traces,” 4. 36 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 16–17. Azoulay emphasizes terms like “civil contract” and “civic duty” to describe the relationship between

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them. This slippage has become even more pronounced, the absence of any human figures in the frame made more haunting and uncomfortable to behold, since the publication of the series in the FTL volume in 2014. For just two just years later, in 2016, the camp that once dominated life, public discourse, and politics in and around Calais was dismantled, its inhabitants forcibly moved into shipping containers before being resettled elsewhere. Albin Millot’s series, Les Limites de la France, homes in on the status of international frontiers in an even more direct way (Figure 3.4). Millot, a French citizen who takes advantage of the right established by the Schengen agreements to circulate from one country in Europe to the next at will—unlike the thousands of migrants forced to do so clandestinely, often under the cover of darkness—ponders the way most inhabitants of France have come to take the frontier for granted. Millot shot these photographs at night, or dusk, often under cloudy skies in difficult, dark conditions. But he occasionally places industrial-strength glow lights on the ground to highlight the invisible and unmarked lines that separate the Hexagon from neighboring countries, revealing where national borders lie. The captions that include a location’s coordinates invite viewers to get their bearings with precision. That said, if Millot’s solitary treks up mountain faces, along rocky coastline, through forests, over rivers, and across plains suggests how liberating going to the edge of France can be, one wonders—after Brexit, and with the rising tide of populism that threatens the very existence of the European Union—if Millot’s project, in another context, could be appropriated to more nefarious ends to remind us that the limits of France signal a “no-go zone” that limits the freedom of movement for those who have become displaced and rendered “out-of-place” by the violent inequities of globalization.37 Finally, to cite a last though no less compelling example, in Béatrix von Conta’s contribution to the FTL, a series entitled Flux, the artist sets out to explore the problematic of traffic and transportation as it manifests in pictures of cargo trucks crossing rivers and streams in the photographers, subjects, and spectators in order to shed “terms such as ‘empathy,’ ‘shame,’ ‘pity,’ or ‘compassion’ as organizers of this gaze.” 37 Zygmunt Bauman refers to these populations, left behind and made redundant by the “inevitable outcome of modernization,” as the “human waste” of an increasingly overpopulated planet. See Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 5.

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Drôme and Ardèche départements in southeast France (Figure 3.5). As she notes, rivers are paradoxical features of a landscape, at once free-flowing connectors of space, from the mountains to the sea, and a locus of separation, an obstacle that occasionally needs to be crossed or controlled (Figure 3.5 is marked by the presence of a spillway). Enter the bridge, which in von Conta’s pictures operates as a problematic but necessary link in the global supply chain. In each picture anonymous semi-trailers make their way through the countryside, delivering goods, from “the essential to the superfluous,” to places beyond the frame. This, the photographs suggest, is how globalization works on an everyday scale, leaving its mark on even the “deepest reaches of the countryside.”38 If von Conta’s images think through the notion of flux in pictures that take crossing as theme, they also resonate with work by the three other photographers that I mention briefly above. For example, one might look at these images and consider, as von Conta does, how the construction of roads and bridges, the deployment of trucks and shipping containers, and the advances in technology and logistics that allow for the distribution of goods across the global supply chain have impacted the environment. In their depiction of striated and man-altered landscapes marked by infrastructure, von Conta’s photographs, like those of Emmanuelle Blanc, are evocative not simply of the inexorable mutation of the land, but of the impact of these changes on an ever more impermanent global climate. Von Conta’s inquiry into forms of separation and rivers that often delineate regional frontiers39 also resonates with Albin Millot’s thinking about national borders and the way we often take their potential to limit movement, under the right political circumstances, for granted. As Millot has said, the trade in goods and services, which often depends on the kinds of trucks we see in von Conta’s photographs, takes precedence over the well-being of marginalized people. Uninhibited circulation “is above all economic rather than human.”40 Readers of the FTL volume might ponder these reflections on borders and also be reminded of Julien Chapsal’s pictures 38 Béatrix Von Conta, artist’s statement, in France(s) territoire liquide, ed. Bernard Comment (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 95. 39 The Rhône River demarcates the two départements where these photographs were made. 40 Albin Millot, “Albin Millot met les frontières de la France en lumière,” interview with Molly Ben, OAI13, June 3, 2014, http://www.oai13.com/non-classe/ france-s-territoire-liquide-albin-millot-met-les-frontieres-de-la-france-en-lumiere/.

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of places around Calais haunted by traces of placeless migrants passing through. For the commercial vehicles that anchor von Conta’s work in a narrative about the movement of merchandise could just as easily be used as tools in the network of human trafficking that preys upon those seeking refuge in France, a nation, like others throughout Europe, that has been forced to reconsider the permeability of its national boundaries in the wake of the migrant crisis, but which must also calibrate the use of those frontiers according to the evolving economic imperatives of global commerce and international exchange. The Local Turn In their forensic observation of the French territory, both the OPP and FTL projects invite viewers to participate in an “ethnology of the proximate.”41 Indeed, looking at these series of images trains us to become more adept surveyors of the here and now, what Robert Macfarlane calls “the undiscovered country of the nearby.”42 Which is to say that, despite differences in their approach to the landscape, the OPP and FTL are united in their efforts to illuminate the local. Local places matter because the local is where we primarily conduct our lives.43 The local is always measured in human proportions. It is accessible, comprised of sites that seem familiar and coherent. Not only is the local always close to home, it is also limited in scope. Dominique Auerbacher’s pictures from the OPP do not deign to represent the entire TGV line from Paris to Lille but instead show us a portion of its route that intersects and impacts life near the town of Seclin. Viewers do not see the whole expanse of the Landes de Gascognes regional park in the FTL series by Emilie Viallet, but her work gives us a strong sense of that place by isolating views of landscapes modified as much by human beings—in the form of ocean-front pavilions, tennis courts, and a water park—as it has been by the billowing of sand and the encroachment of dunes. And 41 Jean-Didier Urbain explains this practice in Perecquian terms: “the function of an ethnology of the proximate is to discover the exotic potential of the here-andnow, to exoticize the endotic.” Urbain, Secrets de voyage (Paris: Payot, 1998), 246. 42 Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (New York: Penguin, 2008), 225. 43 Doreen Massey writes that the local is the “geographical source of meaning, vital to hold on to as ‘the global’ spins its ever more powerful and alienating webs.” Massey, For Space, 5.

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in Yann de Fareins’s FTL photographs of the administrative edges of the Gard in the south of France, viewers can clearly discern lines in the pavement that demarcate one département from the next. Topographic photographs like these frame distinct sectors of the territory, limiting the field of vision to locations that we could easily pinpoint on a map of France by zooming in and recalibrating the scale. The Observatoire photographique du paysage and France(s) territoire liquide both intimate how one cannot understand France, and one certainly cannot claim to have cultivated an appreciation of its diverse topographies, without knowing something about the way the culture perceives, engages with, and pictures its local places. The comparatively small, often peripheral, and apparently insignificant and minor geographies matter, these pictures seem to say. Not least of all because they resist a more commonplace, clichéd vision of an indivisible national space with Paris (and its associated symbolism) holding it all together at its center. As historian Stéphane Gerson reminds us, this kind of thinking was not always de rigueur. French attitudes about the local tend to ebb and flow over the course of the last 200 years. Scholars have argued that as the French Republic emerged from the Revolution of 1789, and as it struggled to refine itself through the various regimes that followed during much of the nineteenth century, “expressions of local autonomy, association, and individuality” were altogether denigrated since, as Gerson notes, “excessive attachment to a specific territory could redirect loyalty away from the nation” and thus threaten the cohesion necessary for national stability.44 As Gerson goes on to argue, however, by the end of the nineteenth century this mentality started to shift as “the local provided an obligatory conduit toward national self-understanding. Localities learned about themselves; they learned about one another; and France grew aware of its identity as a diverse yet united nation.”45 This becomes especially important at the turn of the twentieth century, after the Franco-Prussian war, when the French 44 Stéphane Gerson, “The Local,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, ed. Edward G. Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 213. Historian Sara Pritchard notes that a vision of France as a centralized state took root in the ancien régime and became anchored even more deeply during the Revolution of 1789 as the Jacobins, “advocates of centralization and statism,” imposed a political vision that was to dominate in post-revolutionary France. See Pritchard, “Paris et le désert français,” 178–79. 45 Gerson, “The Local,” 215.

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populace continued to learn how little it knew about rural France, just as legislators sought to expand the reach of the centralized bureaucracy during the Third Republic. The tension between local and national affiliation came to a head in the period that began with the Liberation in 1945. As Philip Whalen and Patrick Young have pointed out, the Second World War “represented a time of significant re-localization for many French, as conditions of defeat, displacement, and deprivation […] compelled a general turning inward toward familiar and/or local linkages.”46 But the role of the centralized state once again gained strength and took on new relevance as France modernized during the 30 “glorious” post-war years that were marked by major economic advancement, unprecedented capital investment and technological development, and the rise of the technocratic society.47 I would argue that the timing of this is not inconsequential. It seems quite logical that the OPP and FTL would materialize in a new period in French administrative history that began with the passing, in 1982, of a set of important political decentralization laws that effectively bestowed more power and accountability upon local authorities to govern “affairs that specifically concern them.”48 Keep in mind that the Mission photographique de la DATAR was sponsored by an inter-ministerial agency formed in 1963 and charged with coordinating and implementing development and infrastructure projects on a national scale. Like most state entities prior to decentralization, the DATAR deployed a top-down, centralized style of management by which powers are traditionally granted to regional prefects, agents of the state charged with administration of the territories, a role that dates to the Revolution and the passing of a “law concerning the division of the territory of the Republic and the Administration.” While the photographers who participated in the DATAR mission produced pictures grounded in local places (one might think of Raymond Depardon’s images of his family farm outside 46 Philip Whalen and Patrick Young, “The Local in French History: Changing Paradigms and Possibilities,” in Place and Locality in Modern France (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), xxiv. 47 One could also argue, following Kristin Ross, that the renewed dominance of the centralized state in post-war France during the Trente Glorieuses was in fact a form of national “turning inward” as a response to decolonization. See Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. 48 Albert Mabileau, Le Système local en France (Lagrasse: L.G.D.J., 1991), 21.

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Lyon, or Suzanne Lafont’s photographs of a disaffected industrial site in Lorraine), the project was funded and managed by a central agency celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its founding and concerned with re-envisioning a national landscape profoundly transformed by over three decades of change. From the start, the focus of the OPP’s founders, on the other hand, imagined artists charged with working in close contact with municipalities who could direct them to sites from which the evolution of a local territoire might be best observed. As the head of the OPP, Caroline Mollie-Stefulesco, has remarked, “The principle relies on the association—in the context of a public commissions— between artists, planners, and municipalities working collectively on a given landscape’s destiny.”49 If the vision of a modernizing France in the Mission photographique de la DATAR is thus one that begins with the nation and is then broken down into fractured parcels illustrative of the larger whole, the OPP, more grassroots in orientation, moves in the opposite direction, from the ground up and out, so to speak.50 In a similar way, in defining their own mission, the founders of the FTL reacted quite pointedly to another kind of singular, one could say centralized or unilateral vision of the nation embodied, just a few years earlier, in La France de Raymond Depardon, which I discuss more extensively in Chapter Five. This photographic mission of another sort, made by one artist, acting alone, traversing the country over several years and supported by significant corporate and institutional sponsorship, dominated the conversation about the state of French photography in the early 2000s.51 As Bernard Comment writes, barely 49 Mollie-Stefulesco, “Huit ans d’Observatoire,” 3. 50 Early on, the DATAR’s administrators established close working relationships with various state agencies that could support photographers working with the mission. The SNCF, for example, backed Sophie Ristelhueber’s series on railway landscapes, allowing the artist access to normally restricted railyards and train lines. While the DATAR’s organizers did enlist municipalities to devise their own local projects and pick up where the national mission photographique left off, those regions that managed to find the necessary resources did so independently, which is to say with the blessing but without the financial or administrative backing of the DATAR. See Bertho, La Mission photographique de la DATAR, 27. 51 Depardon’s photographic tour of France culminated in a major exhibition at the French National Library in Paris, as well as in the publication of a monumental catalogue. See Depardon, La France de Raymond Depardon (Paris: Seuil, 2010). For a more thorough discussion of Depardon’s project, and a reading which nuances Comment’s suggestion that La France is excessively monolithic, see Chapter Five.

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masking his reference to Depardon’s work, the FTL embraces the critical mass of its 43 contributors because “one finds in this project a welcome sense of plurality. Today, those who evoke a particular vision of France (‘The’ France) speak a bit too loudly and take up too much space in our minds.”52 The emergence of the OPP and the FTL does not simply correspond to a push away from the center that we see occurring on a larger scale in France in the 1980s and 1990s. It testifies to the waning dominance of a certain idea of national cohesion during a period when, as the editors to the volume Place and Locality in Modern France write, “a multifaceted crisis of French growth, social solidarity, and liberal political impasse has engendered,” in French life, but also in fields as diverse as geography, history, anthropology, and critical analysis of the arts, “a turn toward current and vestigial expressions of place-rootedness.”53 This idea, that these two photographic missions respond directly to this more widespread cultural shift is, of course, a speculative one. But it is potentially very useful for thinking about the evolution of a new kind of landscape photography that emerged in France in the 1980s after more than half a century when landscape was considered a “forsaken” genre in French photography.54 We might, in conclusion, even consider how this idea can provide a structure for thinking about the emergence of another, undoubtedly related cultural trend. For could we not consider the turn toward the topographic in contemporary French culture more generally—not simply in French photography, but in French literature and cinema, too—as a turn (or return, as it were) to the local?

52 Comment, “Préface,” 4. 53 Whalen and Young, Place and Locality in Modern France, xvi. 54 Hers and Latarjet, “L’expérience du paysage,” 31.

chapter four

Thick Landscapes Thick Landscapes

I am fond of places that do not overwhelm you with charm. There the imagination is free to roam […] My sense of curiosity tends to lead me to things that we neglect or do not see, without assigning any specific value to them. An intuition makes me think that these cracks in the real possess a poetic quality that surpasses that of objects to which we have become accustomed. —Georges Picard1 The idea we have of the world would be overturned if we could succeed in seeing the intervals between things (for example, the space between the trees on the boulevard) as objects and inversely, if we saw the things themselves—the trees—as the ground. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty2

Thierry Girard and Thibaut Cuisset photograph places that seem remarkable in their apparent insignificance. Intrigued by what writer Georges Picard calls the interstices or “cracks” in the everyday that are rife with poetic potential, inconspicuous landscapes are what most often give these photographers pause.3 Firm believers in the power of art to 1 Picard, Le Vagabond approximatif, 15–16. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 48–9. 3 Picard, Le Vagabond approximatif, 15–16.

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make the unseen more visible, Girard and Cuisset consistently challenge the consensus with respect to what is usually considered worthy of our regard. To borrow a term from Michael Cronin, theirs is an exactingly “microspective” way of seeing, one that invites viewers to: look afresh, to call into question the taken for granted, to take on board the infinitely receding complexity of the putatively routine or prosaic. They suggest that shrinkage is not a matter of scale but of vision. Worlds do not so much shrink as our vision of them. A narrowing of focus, a reduction in scale can in fact lead to an expansion of insight, an unleashing of interpretive and imaginative possibilities.4

In their work, the artists intuit the “succession of traces and imprints”5 that mark the land, and which inform the way they envision it, but which are rarely visible at first glance. Both Girard and Cuisset commune with the places they photograph, allowing them to absorb, and be absorbed by, what Girard calls the “thickness” of the landscape. Their process in turn allows them to discern landscape’s latencies, and to make photographs that elicit “what is hidden or not immediately explicit.”6 While each differs in his approach, both artists practice a way of seeing, experiencing, and photographing the world that seeks to expand our sensibility beyond the visible topographic characteristics of the places they picture. More specifically, as I will argue in the pages that follow, Girard and Cuisset mobilize photography’s capacity to conjure, respectively, the multiple knowledges and sensuous intensities that animate seemingly stagnant sites across the French countryside. Picturing place in these two distinct, though not mutually exclusive ways provides an alternative to more iconic visions of French heritage, one that does not ascribe value to a place based on an impulse to recognize, celebrate, or commemorate but, rather, derives meaning from local microhistories and “ordinary affects.”7 4 Michael Cronin, The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection (Arlesford, UK: Zero Books, 2012), 12. 5 Besse, Le Goût du monde, 37. 6 Thierry Girard, “Les Paysages de Thierry Girard,” interview with Monique Sicard, in La Fabrique photographique des paysages, ed. Sicard, Aurèle Crasson, and Gabrielle Andries (Paris: Hermann, 2017), 212. Girard evokes the idea of landscape’s “thickness” in an earlier essay from 2010 posted on his blog Des Images et des mots. See “De l’esprit des lieux,” http://www.thierrygirard.com/textes/ thg-limousin.htm. 7 Stewart, Ordinary Affects.

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Pays sage Since the mid-1970s, Thierry Girard has explored the ways everyday landscape helps shape a sense of place, producing an array of photographic series that display a diverse set of distinct yet related principles. Influenced by the kind of road trips made famous by American photographers whom he admires, like Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore, a number of Girard’s projects track the artist’s movement along a preordained path, whether crossing France from one sea to the other—from the Mediterranean to the Mer d’Iroise—or ambling along the Tôkaidô way connecting Kyoto to Tokyo.8 These series chart places visited and things seen as much as they attest to a more intimate journey that Girard experiences along the way. Compared to these itineraries, which are facilitated by modern forms of transportation and travel (like planes, trains, and automobiles), his series of “photographic walks” revel, instead, in their leisurely pace. Walking in nature, these pictures tell us, awakens the senses and opens the body and mind to the pulsating energies of the landscape that the artist seeks not so much to capture but to emit in his photographs.9 A third tendency that informs Girard’s practice is the recognition of a metaphorical potential inherent in the landscape, and in the representation of that landscape in photographs that distance themselves from a more documentary mode. The photographer, motivated here by concerns more lyrical than descriptive, seeks to ascribe a sense of poetry or symbolism to the visible world and unlock the hidden secrets at play beneath or beyond what we can see with our own eyes. Finally, Girard’s corpus has been marked by his longstanding participation in the Observatoire photographique du paysage, which I discuss in the previous chapter, and that has taken him repeatedly back to the Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord to photograph and rephotograph sites in that corner of France for almost 20 years.10 While Girard shows his work regularly in galleries and museums, his series circulate most widely in the almost 30 monographic photobooks that he has published with some of France’s leading fine art editors. 8 See, respectively, D’une mer l’autre (Paris: Marval, 2002) and La Route du Tôkaidô (Paris: Marval, 1999). 9 See, for example, his series documenting a year of walks around a lake in the Limousin, Les Cinq voies de Vassivière (Toulouse: Les Imaginayres, 2005). 10 For a retrospective look at this work, see Thierry Girard, Paysage temps (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2019).

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More than any other artist that I consider in these pages, Girard’s process is closely linked to its publication in book form. He almost always conceives his projects with the publication of a book in mind, not as a supplement to the exhibition of his pictures on a wall but as the primary means of distributing his work.11 The photobook is an especially appealing format because it offers a level of portability, access, and permanence that an exhibition does not. As art critic Gerry Badger has noted, the photobook also has the advantage of positioning the artist as an auteur. Designed intentionally for consumption by a broader public, the photobook is an ideal vehicle by which to broadcast a cohesive vision and showcase a signature style.12 The notion of artist as auteur resonates exceedingly well in the context of Girard’s work. The book form is so crucial to his practice because it provides an ideal support for written reflection, creating a space where words and images can interact productively. While he occasionally invites authors and thinkers to contribute a preface or a postface, much of Girard’s photobooks are “self-collaborative photo-texts”13 that frequently include the artist’s own writerly musings designed to contextualize and help readers engage more deeply with the photographs printed on the page. Reading Girard’s prose, whether in his books or in his published correspondence,14 one quickly discerns a fierce intelligence, a deep familiarity with photographic history and technique, and a passion for the arts and culture more broadly. His writing, which never deigns to explain his pictures but instead seeks to “nourish” them,15 abounds with references to history and philosophy, novels and poetry. If Girard is an avid reader, he is also a consummate researcher. In conceptualizing his 11 For Girard, the photobook gives meaning and structure to the viewer’s experience of the images in a way that an exhibition cannot. Thierry Girard and Yannick Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2018), 143. 12 Gerry Badger, “Introduction: The Photobook: Between the Novel and Film,” in The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1, ed. Badger and Martin Parr (London: Phaidon, 2004), 7. 13 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 7. 14 An ongoing conversation (via email) between Girard and historian Yannick Le Marec, which lasted almost two years from 2015 to 2017, was published as a book that included photographs from some of Girard’s most prominent series. See Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage. 15 Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 57.

0.1 Thierry Girard. Liévin, Hauts-de-France (2017). From Le Monde d’après, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

1.1 Marc Petitjean. Rue Saint-Martin, 1973. From Métro Rambuteau, 1997. Courtesy of the artist. 1.2 Marc Petitjean. Plateau Beaubourg. From Métro Rambuteau, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

1.3 Marc Petitjean. Rue Beaubourg, 1973. From Métro Rambuteau, 1997. Courtesy of the artist. 1.4 Marc Petitjean. Workers and Conical Intersect. From Métro Rambuteau, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

1.5 Marc Petitjean. Conical Intersect. From Métro Rambuteau, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

1.6 Pierre Huyghe. Light Conical Intersect. March, 1996. Event, Paris. Photograph, 80 x 120 cm/31.5 x 47 in. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, France. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

1.7 Stéphane Couturier. Boulevard Morland #2, Paris 4e, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.

1.8 Stéphane Couturier. Boulevard Saint-Germain #1, Paris 6e, 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

1.9 Louis-Émile Durandelle. Paris. Comptoir national d’escompte. État des travaux. 6 mai, 1881. Courtesy Ville de Paris/Bibliothèque historique.

1.10 Andreas Gursky. HSBC Bank, 1994. © Andreas Gursky. Courtesy Sprüth Magers/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

1.11 Stéphane Couturier. Crédit Lyonnais #3, Rue du Quatre-Septembre, Paris 2e, 2001. Courtesy of the artist. 1.12 Marc Petitjean. Beaubourg, 1973. From Métro Rambuteau, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

2.1 Eustachy Kossakowski. Blvd. Jean Jaurès, Clichy/Avenue de la Porte de Clichy, Paris 17e. From 6 mètres avant Paris, 1971. © Anka Ptaszkowska, Paulina Krasińska. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. 2.2 Eustachy Kossakowski. Blvd. Victor Hugo, Neuilly-sur-Seine/Rue Delaizement, Paris 17e. From 6 mètres avant Paris, 1971. © Anka Ptaszkowska, Paulina Krasińska. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

2.3 Patrick Tourneboeuf. Périphérique #02. Porte de Bagnolet, Paris Ring Road. France, 1994. © Patrick Tourneboeuf/Tendance Floue. Courtesy of the artist. 2.4 Patrick Tourneboeuf. Périphérique #28. Porte des Ternes, Paris Ring Road. France, 1994. © Patrick Tourneboeuf/Tendance Floue. Courtesy of the artist.

2.5 Mathieu Pernot. Over Sarcelles (Seine-et-Oise). Les Lochères. Postcard Éditions Lapie. Courtesy of the artist.

2.6 Mathieu Pernot. Untitled. Courtesy of the artist.

2.7 Mathieu Pernot. Meaux. April 24, 2004. Courtesy of the artist. 2.8 Camille Fallet. Housing Development in Cesson, New Town of Sénart. From The Greater Paris Landscape Manual, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

2.9 Camille Fallet. Roe Deer at the Edge of the Parc natural régional du Vexin français, near Cergy. From The Greater Paris Landscape Manual, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. 2.10 Camille Fallet. View of Paris and Sarcelles from the D316 Road. From The Greater Paris Landscape Manual, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

3.1 Gérard Dalla Santa. Itinerary number 13, Parc naturel régional Haute-Vallée de Chevreuse. © Gérard Dalla Santa. Observatoire Photographique National du Paysage. Bullion, Les Valentins, D149 at the entrance to the village. April 1997, April 1998, May 1999, April 2000, April 2002. Courtesy of the artist.

3.2 Emmanuelle Blanc. Cartographie d’une extrême occupation humaine. Untitled n°05. Altitude 1,520 m. Courtesy of the artist.

3.3 Julien Chapsal. Calais, 2013. © Julien Chapsal. Courtesy of the artist.

3.4 Albin Millot. Pointe de Corsen, Plouarzel, Finistère, France. 48°24’46.87»N 4°47’42.46»O 003. Westernmost point in continental France. © Albin Millot and France(s) territoire liquide. Courtesy of the artist. 3.5 Béatrix von Conta. Bridge over the Rhône at the Charmes Dam – Ardèche, 2012. From the FLUX series. © Béatrix von Conta. Courtesy Galerie Le Réverbère Lyon and France(s) territoire liquide.

4.1 Thierry Girard. At the foot of the Puy de la Vache, Puy-de-Dôme (2001). From D’une mer l’autre, 2002. Courtesy of the artist. 4.2 Thierry Girard. Vaux-en-Dieulet, Ardennes (2014). From Salle des fêtes, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

4.3 Thierry Girard. Otterswiller, Bas-Rhin (2016). From Une campagne victorieuse, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 4.4 Thierry Girard. Fighting. July 31, 1944. Chabanais, Charente (October 30, 2007). From Paysages insoumis, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

4.5 Thierry Girard. Mutiny. June 26–September 18, 1917. Café de la Paix, La Courtine, Creuse (May 3, 2009). From Paysages insoumis, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

4.6 Thierry Girard. Insubordination. May 7–8, 1956. La Villedieu, Creuse (May 9, 2007). From Paysages insoumis, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. 4.7 Thierry Girard. On the Road between Tarnac and Peyrelevade (January 11, 2012). From Paysages insoumis, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

4.8 Thierry Girard. Rue Montmailler. Limoges, Haute-Vienne (May 10, 2007). From Paysages insoumis, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. 4.9 Thibaut Cuisset. D1314 near Londinières, Seine-Maritime, Normandie, 2006. © Succession Thibaut Cuisset/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2021.

4.10 Thibaut Cuisset. Étang de Vaccarès, Sainte-Maries-de-la-Mer, Bouches-du-Rhône, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, 2013. © Succession Thibaut Cuisset/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2021.

4.11 Thibaut Cuisset. La Bouilladisse, Bouches-du-Rhône, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, 2010. © Succession Thibaut Cuisset/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2021. 4.12 Thibaut Cuisset. Clermont-Ferrand, Puy-de-Dôme, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, 2013. © Succession Thibaut Cuisset/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2021.

4.13 Thibaut Cuisset. D1 Roncherolles-en-Bray, Seine-Maritime, Normandie, 2006. © Succession Thibaut Cuisset/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2021. 4.14 Thibaut Cuisset. D1 Roncherolles-en-Bray, Seine-Maritime, Normandie, 2006. © Succession Thibaut Cuisset/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2021.

5.1 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Hérault, Bédarieux, 2007. Courtesy of the artist. 5.2 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Hérault, near Montpeyroux, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

5.3 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Gard, col du Minier, 2007. Courtesy of the artist. 5.4 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Lot, Cahors, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

5.5 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Isère, Mens, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

5.6 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Seine-Maritime, Dieppe, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. 5.7 Raymond Depardon. FRANCE. Haut-Rhin, Colmar, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

6.1 Thomas Jorion. Church of the Sacred Heart (1934). Red River Delta, Vietnam. From Vestiges d’empire, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

6.2 Thomas Jorion. Boiler. Dorot Distillery (1932). Marie-Galante, Guadeloupe. From Vestiges d’empire, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

6.3 Thomas Jorion. Cells (1897). Solitary Confinement Building #2. Saint-Joseph Penal Colony. Saint-Joseph Island, French Guiana. From Vestiges d’empire, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 6.4 Thomas Jorion. Villa (circa 1930). Kep-sur-Mer, Cambodia. From Vestiges d’empire, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

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projects, he regularly spends weeks and months consulting maps and historical documents, delving into photographic archives, gathering lists of contacts, and studying eyewitness accounts, travelogues, and narratives set in the areas he plans to visit. For Girard, making photographs involves more than simply triggering the shutter: “There can be no image,” he notes, “without this ‘pre-vision’.”16 While it may seem counterintuitive, at the same time he never lets his probing and planning dictate what the landscapes have to tell or teach him. His practice, patient and open to the ways the everyday will often alert the artist to its presence—“Stop! Wanderer, don’t walk so fast!”17— allows a form of intelligence inherent in the sites he photographs to emerge. Common places are rarely as inert, incidental, or—as Girard says—“indifferent”18 as they may seem. They cannot be reduced to that which presents itself before us. Rather, landscapes have agency. They act upon us, upon our bodies and our minds, as much as we make an impact, quite literally, as we move through them. What sets Girard’s work apart is the way it immerses viewers in detailed tableaux of places that call on us to look with discernment at the elements that come together to compose them. Girard’s work is especially sensitive to the voids, blank spaces, and neglected zones—what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the epigraph to this chapter, calls the “intervals between things”—where there is, on the surface at least, “nothing” to see. “Between the elements that compose the landscape,” Girard notes, “one senses unexpected effects of visibility and invisibility at play.”19 While his phenomenologically inflected fascination for what lies in the midst of things manifests in all of the work he produces, the artist’s penchant for taking pictures in or at the edge of forests is especially notable in this regard. His illustrated diary of a series of linked treks he made across France at the turn of the twentyfirst century, D’une mer l’autre, for example, counts more than a dozen photographs that ask viewers to ponder the actual “space between the trees” that for Merleau-Ponty has the power to upend, for the better, the usual way we see the world. Girard’s texts work in consort with the arboreal imaginary that these pictures represent to help readers understand why these places look the way they do—a patch of firs in a 16 17 18 19

Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 71. Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 79. Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 149. Girard, “Les Paysages de Thierry Girard,” 212.

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picture taken in the Puy-de-Dôme (Figure 4.1), for example, still bear the effects of having been ravaged by a storm years earlier—all the while inviting us to wonder what it might be like to listen in to “the silence of fallen trees, and of those that are still alive, the silence of birds, too, long minutes waiting for another call […] or, more simply, the wind that clears a path between the branches, before something begins to sing.”20 Since 2012, Thierry Girard has been working on a trio of projects that investigate the play of visibility and invisibility in landscape, and of silence and song, to reveal how common places wear, in a sense, local lives and forgotten lore that have been worn into them over time. These three series, entitled Paysages insoumis, Salle des fêtes, and Une campagne victorieuse, are all motivated by the idea that even nondescript places retain faint traces, and can be called upon to disclose forgotten memories, of the past.21 However, rather than focus on obvious sites of historical heritage or consecrated realms of memory, many of which also often bear the wounds of national trauma like the Place de Grève in Paris, notoriously the site of public executions, or the battlefields of the Marne, Girard’s form of topographic investigation seeks out liminal spaces marked by “an inscrutable reality, left abandoned in the gaps of history or somewhere in the edgelands.”22 Following art historian Kitty Hauser, we could consider Girard’s approach in these three related projects as archaeological, in that his photographs posit the landscapes they survey as places where history can be “sensed even if could not directly be seen.” Here, the past is “immanent and therefore (imaginatively, at least) recoverable. The landscape is seen not so much as vista, picture, or space but as site, the place where things have occurred, which certain individuals or groups have inhabited or passed through, or where something once was.”23 In the series from 2016 entitled Salle des fêtes, for example, Girard brings together images taken in locales across the rain-soaked Ardennes region in northern France where, during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871, the French army suffered a major defeat that would lead to the annexation by the German empire of Alsace and Lorraine in 20 Girard, D’une mer l’autre, 93. 21 The first two projects were published as photographic books, while the third is still a series in progress. See Paysages insoumis (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2012) and Salle des fêtes (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2016). 22 Demanze, Un nouvel âge de l’enquête, 11. 23 Hauser, Shadow Sites, 2.

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1871. The series’s titular photograph represents an actual (and, as the picture suggests, uninviting) salle des fêtes, or communal gathering hall (Figure 4.2). Thanks to a clever homophone turned visual pun, the photograph unwittingly signals that this territoire was once the site of a “sale défaite,” a terrible and humiliating military rout. If Girard’s work in the mining basin of northern France that I mention in the Introduction to this volume is made under the sign of Zola’s Germinal, Salle des fêtes resonates with the great naturalist writer’s later novel about that conflict, La Débâcle, published in 1892. The series recalls those difficult years and thinks back to the soldiers who lost their lives then, “poor victims of a stupid and useless war.”24 But these haunting pictures of dour places that dot the countryside here—including images of deserted villages, of disaffected farming and industrial sites under cloudy skies, and, in a separate subsection inserted at the center of the volume, of muddy forests and storm-damaged woodlands where combat broke out in the last days of August 1870—also suggest that the region has never fully recovered. It is still suffering from another kind of loss, one that has left it economically devastated and culturally disregarded. If, as Girard has written, war often turns landscapes into battlefields, landscapes, especially in “broken territories” like these, are also quite often the site of everyday struggles to survive.25 Une campagne victorieuse homes in on rural places in another part of France’s Grand Est, or Great East region, that have also been abandoned in the nation’s march toward modernity and prosperity. The historical reference in the title here, however, points to Girard’s tracing of the route taken by the French army’s Second Armored Division as it made its way from Paris to help liberate the city of Strasbourg from the Germans, this time near the end of the Second World War in 1944 (the deuxième DB, or division blindée as it is known, had played a role in the Liberation of Paris in August that year). While this third installment of his trio of series on landscape and memory focuses on a more upbeat moment from the nation’s past—one that ended in victory rather than defeat—the rurality that this series documents in the Haute-Marne, Meurthe-et-Moselle, and Vosges départements can hardly be considered glorious. While one might discover in this region examples of what Girard calls “picturesque landscapes,” his photographs highlight how economic devastation has left much of this part of the world isolated, lifeless, and, as one image 24 Thierry Girard, Salle des fêtes, 7. 25 Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 118.

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of a red swastika painted on a concrete electricity pole in Otterswiller (Bas-Rhin) suggests (Figure 4.3), menaced by dangerous ideologies and extremist political rhetoric that make this part of France prone to more ominous events perhaps yet to come.26 Girard’s work in the first installment of this memorial trio, Paysages insoumis, exhibits a similarly microspective form of topophilia that transports viewers to places where, like in Salle des fêtes and Une campagne victorieuse, largely forgotten local histories idle under the surface of the real. Emerging from a commission jointly sponsored by municipal councils in the Poitou-Charentes and Limousin regions, this series of “insurgent landscapes” was published as a photobook by the Éditions Loco in 2012. The almost 40 photographs that fill its pages, a mix of color and black-and-white compositions, constitute a visual état des lieux of west-central France: a country road curves through a quiet bourg where a large barn looms; a gently sloping pasture brims with wildflowers—red, white, and yellow—while native grasses seem bent by a breeze; two dirt lanes meet at a crossroads in a minuscule town (of 65 inhabitants) with an evocative toponym (La Mazière-auxBons-Hommes);27 and colorful banners still hanging a few days after the July 14 holiday cast their shadows on the empty streets of Oradoursur-Vayres. Pictures of rivers and streams, thickets and greenwoods, one strikingly covered in snow, also make an appearance here, as do a few village locals present in photographs that treat them not as subjects of a portrait, but rather as elements of the larger landscape that surrounds them. People do not so much dwell in the places that Girard pictures as much as these places seem to inhabit their inhabitants.28 While the photographs focus intently on natural and built features that compose the landscape, Paysages insoumis is committed to revealing 26 Girard speaks about both series in an interview produced for the opening of an exhibition at the Galerie Maupetit in Marseille at the end of November 2017. See Girard, “Thierry Girard expose Salle des fêtes,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pq3JmAfBrzQ. 27 The town is named for a group of local monks who, during the Middle Ages, were known for their charity as much as for their austere lifestyle. 28 In this sense, Girard’s photographs resonate with Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposition that land becomes landscape when it “dissolves” human presences. When people are occasionally visible within the frame in Paysages insoumis they appear as figures whom “the land occupies, takes hold of and, as one says, ‘absorbs’ into itself.” Nancy, “Uncanny Landscapes,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 58.

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the palimpsestic quality of these places. While keen viewers will be able to discern in several photographs the presence of monuments to local war dead or commemorative stelae honoring fallen heroes, most sites depicted here remain unmarked by any material traces that explicitly conjure the past. Landscape, as art historian Lisa Saltzman has argued, is “fundamentally amnesiac,” often failing “to reveal its history.” Photography, however, has the ability to “mark and remember,” and to recover and recollect.29 Indeed, as Girard has written, photographs are often anamnestic, armed with the power to “coax from a seemingly ordinary and innocent landscape something from its painful memory.”30 Harnessing the medium’s capacity to recall, Girard’s work, with some help from his captions, seeks to transform the commonplace paysage into a pays sage that possesses a form of topographic wisdom and a yearning to show, tell, and even teach viewers something about a place’s past. While the images themselves occasionally insinuate an erstwhile event, Girard’s narrative captions help viewers mine with precision the strata that compose the “multilayered landscape” in this forgotten corner of France.31 Take, for example, a photograph that Girard made in Chabanais, in the Charente département, in October 2007 (Figure 4.4). This place, shot from a bridge over the Vienne River in a town home to less than 2,000 people, is typical of Girard’s style. The shot is crisp from side to side and front to back, thanks in part to the use of a view camera and tripod that allow for exceptional stability, clarity, and depth of field. The tones are flat and the hues subdued, except for a few pops of color, notably red, which hint at the story this photo has to tell.32 The subject is altogether banal. A sidewalk, a few parked cars, two trucks, a pair of intersecting streets wet from rain, traffic pylons, and a lamppost fill the frame. “Move along,” the image instructs viewers, “nothing much to see here.” Save, perhaps, for two “hieroglyphic” references to death.33 29 Lisa Saltzman, “What Remains: Photography and Landscape, Memory and Oblivion,” in Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, ed. Nat Trotman and Jennifer Blessing (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2010), 127. 30 Girard, D’une mer l’autre, 14. 31 Roger, Court traité du paysage, 116. 32 Girard is often attracted to sites marked by chromatic details that accentuate the sobriety of the places he photographs, like the blazing red and orange reeds that stand out in the foreground of Figure 4.3. 33 I borrow the notion of the hieroglyph from Tom Conley who, in his study of “filmic hieroglyphs,” identifies often wondrous moments when viewers notice the

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The first can be seen in the curious makeshift banner hung crudely from a balcony above the pharmacy, and which warns travelers, firmly and with a shock, of a hazardous section of nearby four-lane roadway that has seen several fatal accidents over the years: “ROUTE 141 GRAVE DANGER SLOW DOWN.” The second, slightly more difficult to discern, is a sign visible over the flower shop on the right of the picture alerting us to a business devoted to the “Funerary Arts” located in the same building.34 These two details—one warning us of a nearby peril, the other, a memento mori of sorts, evocative of every human’s ultimate demise—make a moody landscape even more sullen.35 But they also take on unexpected meaning when we consider the image’s caption, “Fighting, July 31, 1944, Chabanais, Charente,” which invites viewers to consider the calamitous events that happened in this very spot on that day shortly before the Liberation of Paris: During the war, when the guerrilla resistance was very active on the outskirts of Chabanais, notably in the Chambon forest, the town itself was split between resistants and collaborators, among whom was a group of fascist paramilitaries. As a result, the fighting of July 31, 1944, which led to the liberation of this key town on the road between Angoulême and Limoges, broke out on both sides of the Vienne. These skirmishes were especially violent near the bridge that crosses the river.36

As much as Girard steeps himself in the history of these landscapes as part of his process, the caption, backed by research in the archives and interviews with locals in the field, does much to instruct viewers how to, as Hauser says, “see the landscape archeologically,” to understand it as a “site” haunted by specters from the past.37 If the photographs in Paysages insoumis communicate with their captions to suggest the confluence of past and present that marks this region, they also occasionally echo this past symbolically in their form. “presence of alphabetical and iconic writing within the field” of the image. See Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxiv. 34 Whether or not the flower shop doubles as a provider of marble crosses and granite urns is uncertain. 35 The trio of eyes gazing at viewers from the window of the pharmacy on the left—seen in three adjacent advertisements for facelifting cream—appear almost prophetic in this context, a reminder to viewers that we are all mortal, despite attempts we might make to slow the biological impact of time. 36 Girard, Paysages insoumis, 72. 37 Hauser, Shadow Sites, 24.

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In the same image from Chabanais, for example, while the text on the banner warns of danger down the road, its crimson lettering hints at the heated clashes that took place here near the end of the war. The photograph is dominated by muted grays and whites—the color of the clouds matches the soggy cinderblock and stucco veneer of the buildings—but a few other pops of red call out for attention. The cargo truck at the center of the frame is red, as is a red visibility band that marks a traffic pylon on the corner of the bridge. Perhaps thanks to the way the light is reflected off that very pylon, attentive viewers will also note a splotch of metallic crimson in a puddle in the foreground in front of them, a reminder of the French-on-French violence that haunts this place and which Girard’s picture seems to make seep out of the ground, like an old wound that bleeds when scratched. While violent clashes between local maquisards and the milice during the Second World War are a frequent reference in this series—almost half of the photobook’s published images hearken back to the dark years of the Nazi Occupation—Paysages insoumis posits an entire region as a longstanding locus of revolt and insurgency. The area has, for centuries, been marked by local opposition to threats from external actors or controversial impositions from the state that often resulted in the kinds of events to which Girard’s captions refer: “Attack,” “Clash,” “Disturbances,” “Ambushes,” “Troubles,” “Insurrection,” and “Uprisings.” The series crisscrosses the region’s varied terrain, from Montmorillon and Limoges to Puy-les-Vignes and Tulle, arresting the viewer’s gaze upon small farms, parking lots, roadway intersections, and cemeteries, all while visually mapping an outwardly innocuous territory composed of sites one after the next haunted by a long history of civil disobedience stretching from the uprising of Périgordian croquants near the end of the sixteenth century and popular protests against unfair taxation in the eighteenth and nineteenth, to, as I mentioned, resistance activities against the Nazi occupiers and their French collaborators during the Occupation and, finally, opposition to the war in Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Often, the events haunting these sites are altogether unanticipated, like the story of a military camp at La Courtine, in the Creuse, that was home, in 1917, to around 10,000 expatriated Russian soldiers sent there to avoid contaminating the French army on the Great War’s western front with their revolutionary ideals. As Girard recounts in his caption for this picture, entitled “Mutiny,” when the French authorities sought to demobilize these foreign troops, almost 500 fought back, resisting for a month and a

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half. The insurgency cost over 100 men their lives. The picture that accompanies Girard’s narrative, an image taken on the street leading to the entrance to the camp, does not so much illustrate the event as much as invite us to imagine a scene (Figure 4.5). The derelict façade of an old café formerly known, in an ironic twist, as the Café de la Paix, suggests it has been closed for business for quite some time, its windows covered in swoops of white glass chalk. A covered stairway on the left leads to an entrance on the second floor, and a wooden gate gives access to an alleyway toward a yard around the back. While Girard’s photo-textual microhistory zooms in on a near-forgotten event, reducing the scale of its observation in search of “factors previously unrevealed,”38 it does not provide many clues about what exactly happened at the Café de la Paix in 1917. It does, however, hint at the possibility for surreptitious conversations, behind closed doors and in hideaways, where Russian ghosts might still be heard whispering in their quiet efforts to “collude with the local population.”39 While Girard could have made similar photos in any number of départements around France, the case of the Creuse and its contiguous départements where these photographs were shot, notably the Haute-Vienne, Vienne, Charente, and Corrèze, is so compelling because it is one of France’s least inhabited places, suffering from the greatest population decline of any French region during last 50 years. Occupying a major swath on the southwest quadrant of the “empty diagonal,” as demographers call it, this little-known part of France is full of what author Pierre Bergounioux calls “petty, gray, mean places.”40 Many of the sites depicted in these images are not only impoverished and marginalized, they seem petrified and frozen in time. Girard’s series thus turns the devitalized and “inanimate topography” in one of France’s most forgotten and forlorn places into an “historical agent”41 capable of conjuring its past and considering how it continues to reverberate through the present. Given the region’s reputation as a hotbed of defiance, it is perhaps not surprising that when Girard was making these pictures between 2007 38 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 101. 39 Girard, Paysages insoumis, 40. 40 Pierre Bergounioux, “Insoumission,” in Girard, Paysages insoumis, 9. 41 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995), 13.

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and 2009, that legacy would emerge once again, materializing ever so subtly in the last image of the series. This picture and its caption work together to resuscitate a local act of insubordination during the Algerian war when, in May 1956, inhabitants of the town of La Villedieu blocked a military truck transporting young conscripts on their way overseas. The next day, authorities arrested the mayor of La Villedieu and a local teacher, stripping them of their civic rights and sentencing them to a term in prison. The photograph, entitled “Insubordination,” depicts an intersection in the town where these events played themselves out (Figure 4.6). The photograph is also marked by the history of the two world wars. Our eyes are drawn to the center of the frame, where a stone obelisk engraved with two sets of names honors local inhabitants who gave their lives defending France during those two conflicts. This memorial also includes an iron replica of a small trench mortar and four mortar shells, though these elements are slightly obscured by the presence of a utility pole. Discerning viewers, however, will also notice a reference to yet another important occurrence, this one more contemporary. For just under a handwritten placard declaiming that “The Republic Is Dead. Power to the Communes,” the word “REZO” is visible, painted in black on the wooden exterior of the structure on the right. As Girard notes in his caption, this mysterious graffiti refers not to the events that occurred here in 1956, nor to the two world wars, but rather to a group of provocative artist-activists that lived in the area in the early 2000s who became famous during the highly mediatized coverage of what would come to be known as the “Tarnac Affair,” named after a nearby town. There, near the turn of the last century, a small group of young, anti-consumerist intellectuals began to settle, attracted by the potential for a more quiet, communal, and just existence having grown tired of the frenetic pace of life in France’s cities. While the entire region is known for its independent streak, as Paysages insoumis shows, Tarnac was also a bastion of early resistance to Nazi occupation during the war and had become what Girard calls a “den of the radical left.”42 In 2008, a cohort of young anarchists, the “Tarnac Nine,” were arrested and charged with conspiring to commit terrorist activities. They were also accused of having sabotaged a high-speed train line. While these charges were later dropped, though not until 2018, the group led by activist Julien Coupat embodies the longstanding history of anti-institutional protest that marks this region. 42 Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 89.

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In this sense, the black-and-white photograph that opens Girard’s photobook, shot in 2012, resonates with the series’s final image from 2007 (Figure 4.7). For here, on an upwardly sloping road between Tarnac and Peyrelevade that traverses the sparsely populated Millevache highlands, the words “INSURGENT PLATEAU” have been painted. The letters, worn by weather and the passage of time, are difficult to discern. They are barred in places by fresh tire tracks that evoke the layering of territorial memory that Girard’s series seeks to expose. Paysages insoumis thus begins and ends with two photographs that subliminally hint that the Plateau de Millevaches, which straddles the boundaries of the Creuse and the Corrèze départements, is known as much for the “harshness of its landscapes” as for the longstanding “rebel solidarity” of its inhabitants, a trend that has continued into the early years of the twenty-first century.43 This inaugural image also serves as a useful corollary to the final sequence of the photobook, an annex which, unlike the primary series, does not interrogate sites for their ties with the past nor show how it continues to manifest in the present. Rather, these last images—displayed, notably, without titles or captions—make room to postulate about the future, suggesting that the region’s venerable disobedience shows no signs of abating. Here, a small portfolio of seven additional photographs, which Girard calls “Possible Histories, Probable Landscapes,” offers viewers a few more microspective looks at landscapes shot mostly in towns in the same regions where the kinds of insurrectional activity that the artist charts throughout the rest of his series have yet to happen, though the implication is that they could one day. Here, deserted streets evoke an eerie sense of calm and invite viewers to imagine a scenario emerging out of thin air. Some images smack of reconnaissance photos, basking in a moment of quiet before an impending storm. A picture of an inauspicious housing estate in Limoges, for example, is shot from behind the brick wall of an adjacent building. This covert perspective turns viewing into a form of surveillance. Other images draw our attention to the depths of the photographed field and invite us to gauge the “possibility” of an event, even small in scale. And in the penultimate image of a tree-filled empty lot that sits between two buildings, the graffiti scrawled onto a corrugated yellow fence—“Of this civilization, only the ruins are fertile”—reconsiders what we leave to rot, positing that residue and wreckage is perhaps more laden with potential than we 43 Girard, “De l’esprit des lieux.”

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usually recognize (Figure 4.8). As Girard notes in a brief text introducing this annex series, “we could swear that these landscapes were speaking. And so we listen to them.”44 Paysages insoumis thus ends its tour of this forgotten part of France with a small dossier of documentary images that speculate about fictional possibilities and contemplate a future, as yet unwritten, for usually unseen places that might, one day, deserve a set of discursive and archaeological captions all their own. Seeing, Feeling Before his untimely passing at age 58 in January 2017, Thibaut Cuisset spent 30 years making photographs of landscapes around the world. Shot with medium- and large-format view cameras to produce strikingly tranquil images of various kinds of terrain—from the Namibian desert and Icelandic alpine tundra to the Syrian steppe, the Swiss Alps, peri-urban Italy, and the Japanese countryside—each of Cuisset’s series ponders the state of place via a rigorous topographic investigation of materials, features, and forms, both natural and constructed, that compose the territories under consideration. After years working abroad, in 1994 Cuisset began to pursue an interest in the landscapes of his native country. His remarks about shifting his gaze to France resonate with the approach taken by many of the photographers I have discussed thus far: Photographing the French landscape has attracted me for some time. Not a picturesque or exotic countryside, but one that is closer to us, perhaps more ordinary, even more alive, where things happen sometimes slowly, […] but other times quite quickly. These are places that are rarely spoken about, but which nevertheless contribute to the great topographic diversity that we see in France.45

Of the numerous monographic photobooks he published in his lifetime, more than half of them focus exclusively on specific regions in metropolitan France: from the Hérault, the Camargue, southern Alsace, and a sliver of Normandy just northeast of Rouen, to the outskirts of 44 Girard, Paysages insoumis, 85. 45 Thibaut Cuisset, “Thibaut Cuisset: Campagne française/Fragments,” press release for an exhibit of Cuisset’s work during the Mois de la photo at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris (October–November 2010), n. pag.

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Clermont-Ferrand, a small municipality in the hills above Marseille, and the streets of Montreuil outside his studio. He also exhibited series of photographs of the Midi, and of sites located high in the Alps, in Corsica, and in the Loire Valley. This work attests to the photographer’s penchant for a meticulous, thoughtful, and intensely immersive way of seeing and experiencing the world. His images frame what he called “intermediary” sites and “desolate, abandoned spaces”46 with a sensitive appreciation of color, line, and light. As the aesthetic philosopher and landscape specialist Alain Roger notes, most inhabitants of the south of France never quite saw the Mont Sainte-Victoire as a landscape worthy of their regard until Cézanne made it shine in his paintings.47 Similarly, Cuisset’s work portrays the Hexagon’s vernacular topographies in a quest to make these modest sites remarkable. It may seem paradoxical, then, that Cuisset was fond of saying that his work is so plain that it risks going unnoticed. His photographs present landscapes in an understated though exceptionally lucid way. Our eyes amble across rolling fields and are drawn into deep vistas of forlorn valleys. Quiet village streets abound, as do country roads leading toward isolated hamlets. Cuisset clearly delights in wandering through residential areas, making photographs that depict the many ways the French live. Forested parcels occupy space on a knoll in the distance. Brownfields excavated to make room for burgeoning commercial construction and seemingly abandoned corners of rural neighborhoods call out to viewers to consider the most pedestrian of details. Cuisset’s corpus roams along the edges of rivers (the Loire and the Somme, most notably), beaches, and trails that line the coastlines from Brittany to the Mediterranean. Signs of agriculture and industry— from grain silos in the Oise and bare vines and freshly harvested lavender in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, to wind farms in the waters off the coast in the Bouches-du-Rhône, oil refineries at the port of Dunkerque, and three reactors letting off steam at a nuclear power plant in the Loiret—accompany landscapes that bear the brunt of less invasive interventions, like in the high alpine pastures in the Savoie and community gardens near the town of Bourbourg.48 46 Thibaut Cuisset, “Les paysages de Thibaut Cuisset,” interview with Monique Sicard, in Sicard, Aurèle Crasson, and Gabrielle Andries, eds, La Fabrique photographique des paysages (Paris: Hermann, 2017), 107. 47 Roger, Court traité du paysage, 21–2. 48 Photographs of several of these sites appear not in monographs that Cuisset

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As critic Michel Crépu notes, the nondescript nature of the places perceived in Cuisset’s pictures makes us wonder if they were not taken by chance: “why there and not here?”49 Unlike the work of Thierry Girard, whose photographic practice features what on the surface seem like a constellation of similarly innocuous geographies but which, in the rich array of texts that accompany each series’s publication in book form, Girard often reveals to be carefully selected and often highly researched repositories of local memory, intertextuality, or personal recollection, Cuisset’s pictures do not reminisce. They are neither historical nor commemorative. They resist symbolization, are hardly ever populated by human figures,50 refuse the urgency to comment or critique, and are staunchly anti-theatrical. Cuisset has spoken of his quest to “dedramatize” the landscapes he photographs. The model that he privileges is that of the épure, a blueprint or working sketch of an object at scale, usually made to aid in that object’s construction.51 These plans are very sensitive to detail and geometric form, as Cuisset’s images are to a given terrain’s depth, elevation, and morphology. Like Cuisset’s photographs, the épure allows for a transparent reading of all the elements contained within. But the term also shares roots with the verb épurer, meaning to purify or refine. This translates in the comparatively unadulterated, even minimalist approach Cuisset takes to representing the landscape, devoid as his pictures are of ornamentation or excess in their composition. If, as I note above, Girard’s photographs often have something to say, Cuisset’s pictures bask instead in their quietude: “landscape does not speak, it is stubbornly mute. What speaks to us, if something must speak, is the silence, the testimony of things through their silence.”52 published in his lifetime, but in the striking retrospective survey that appeared posthumously. See Cuisset, Thibaut Cuisset: Campagnes françaises (Göttingen: Steidl, 2018). 49 Michel Crépu, “Thibaut Cuisset, vers le neutre,” press release for “Thibaut Cuisset: Campagne française/Fragments,” Revue des deux mondes (2010), 11. 50 His series on the streets of Montreuil, on the edge of Paris just east of the boulevard périphérique, is the one exception to this rule. See Thibaut Cuisset, La rue de Paris (Trézélan: Filigranes, 2005). 51 Cuisset, “Les Paysages de Thibaut Cuisset,” 110, 114. 52 Jean-Christophe Bailly, “La Loire de Thibaut Cuisset,” Images au Centre 01, Photographie contemporaine, architecture, et paysages, Château de Fougères-surBièvre (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine/Centre des monuments nationaux, 2001), n.pag.

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The silence of his pictures is perhaps symptomatic of the artist’s shyness and, more importantly, his reserve.53 While he granted several interviews over the course of his career, Cuisset never wrote with any regularity about his work, perhaps to prevent viewers from distraction, to preserve the delicate mix of familiarity, contemplation, and “strangeness”54 that his images evoke. For these are, as the photographs suggest, places we know to exist, even if we do not inhabit them. When we do have an opportunity to see sites like these, the tendency is to do so summarily, without any intentionality. Cuisset’s photographs, however, attend diligently to these places. In doing so, they transform these sites into actors in action and relay the subtle impression of myriad microevents— “the sweep of the wind, the agitation of the waves, the rustle of the foliage, the clashing of branches”55—unfolding within the frame. Landscape is alive and, as I have been suggesting throughout this book, routine places deserve our consideration. But the visual magic of Cuisset’s views of these modest territories lies not simply in their earnest scrutiny—“We see everything,” as landscape designer Gilles Clément has said of them56—but also in their composition. Cuisset’s masterful use of deep focus, for example, allows his images to evoke more transparently the visual truth of the landscape. As the photographer remarked, “I try to find a way of looking at the world by crafting images that I feel are the most accurate possible.”57 His pictures are also designed to be displayed on gallery walls in relatively large-format prints that embody Jean-François Chevrier’s concept of the “tableau form,” a way of making photographs that hearkens back to classical compositional techniques and often borrows formally from modern and premodern painting.58 53 As Bailly notes, Cuisset was a humble, self-effacing artist. See Bailly, “L’étendue de l’instant (le Japon selon Thibaut Cuisset),” in Thibaut Cuisset, Campagne japonaise (Trézélan: Filigranes, 2002), 9. 54 Gilles A. Tiberghien, “Une campagne photographique,” in Thibaut Cuisset, Une Campagne photographique (Trézélan: Filigranes, 2009), 9. 55 Jean Echenoz, “L’horizon,” in Thibaut Cuisset, Le Pays clair, Camargue (Arles: Actes Sud, 2013), n.pag. 56 Gilles Clément, “Le Risque inouï de l’ordinaire,” in Thibaut Cuisset, Un Hérault contemporain (Brussels: AAM, 2007), 77. 57 Thibaut Cuisset, “Le Paysage au filtre du regard photographique équitable,” interview with Paul Ardenne, in Thibaut Cuisset, Un Hérault contemporain, 83. 58 Chevrier, “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photo­­ graphy,” 116.

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Cuisset’s work is informed by painting in two significant ways. When he refers to his projects as “campagnes photographiques,” for example, he explicitly invokes Claude Monet’s forays into the thick of the landscape. Monet referred to these outings as “campagnes de peinture.” Cuisset’s deft appropriation of this polysemic expression suggests both the determined way he works—on his painterly “campaigns,” Monet, too, “battled” with the elements “to extract what he wanted from the landscape”—as well as the visual richness of the mostly rural places themselves (in that the campagne, or countryside, always offers something to behold).59 Cuisset’s art is also indebted to the painterly practice of composition sur le motif. This style of picture making developed near the end of the seventeenth century, when artists from Northern Europe flocked to warmer climates in Italy and worked outside in nature on small sketches that would later serve as models in the production of large-scale canvases in the studio. Those preparatory compositions, however, managed to capture changing conditions on the ground in ways that larger, more time-consuming and labor-intensive pictures produced indoors could not quite match. Much of this work, as in paintings that artists like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot made in France in the 1830s, was, in a sense, impressionistic, and explored the play of light, color, and climate on space.60 Works like this also acknowledged the way landscape is inherently contingent, always evolving, and never static. Cuisset’s approach is similarly alert to these elements. A striking example in which Cuisset harnesses the diffuse, “delicately unctuous”61 effect of atmospheric conditions on the land, and on the photographer looking at the land, can be seen in his work on the Pays de Bray in Normandy. This series, published in book form under the title Une campagne photographique in 2009, visually embeds the viewer in a sequence of landscapes that speak to this place’s unique topography, but also to elements that impact the way inhabitants and visitors alike might experience being there. Shot under partly to mostly overcast skies, from summer to fall, many of the photographs contemplate expansive swaths of terrain, stretching toward the distant horizon (Figure 4.9). 59 Thibaut Cuisset, “Les Paysages de Thibaut Cuisset,” 116. 60 Cuisset identifies light as a passion of his and references his admiration for Vermeer’s magisterial use of light in banal scenes. See his interview with Paul Ardenne, “Le paysage au filtre du regard photographique équitable,” 83. 61 Thierry Girard, in Girard and Le Marec, Dans l’épaisseur du paysage, 208.

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Dominated above by a palate of grays and the occasional spot of blue where skies full of nimbus and stratus clouds open to allow a hint of sun to shine through, the series conveys how the term landscape refers as much to “the wind, the rain, the water, the heat, [and] the climate”62 as it as does to the land beneath our feet and before our eyes. Indeed, like writer Robert Macfarlane, Cuisset always apperceives landscape as a theater that stages the “bristling presence” of ephemeral occurrences that include “the temperature and pressure of the air; the fall of light and its rebounds; the textures and surfaces of rock, soil, and building; the sounds, the scents, and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres” that often inform our experience of place.63 In many of the series’s photographs, the lower half of the frame depicts the terrain unfolding in softly rippling waves, the view organized into different blocks bounded by trees, hedgerows, fences, train tracks, and roads. These blocks render a number of photographs almost abstract in their composition, a color field painting composed of distinctly colored fields. The lush vegetation visible in pictures that accentuate the many shades of green, from olive and emerald to chartreuse, shamrock, and sage, gives way in other images to a palette of browns, beiges, yellows, and ochers visible in densely packed fields of wheat and, from time to time, on the roofs of houses and barns made, respectively, of kiln-fired tile or corrugated tin that has rusted after exposure to years of squalls. While completely devoid of explicit human presence, the orderly division of these fields, populated here and there by farms, homes, barns, and the occasional industrial storehouse, hints at just how much man has managed these parcels over time. Regardless of which part of France he photographs, the relative banality of sites highlighted in the work belies Cuisset’s commitment to evoking the singularity of the landscape in those territories. The images that comprise Une campagne photographique, for example, explore the environmental, architectural, and infrastructural characteristics that make the boutonnière (French for buttonhole) of the Pays de Bray stand out. A swath of territory running for 60 km between Beauvais and Dieppe where centuries of erosion have gently molded the surface of the earth into a succession of undulating folds, the boutonnière provides 62 Besse, Le goût du monde, 37. 63 Robert Macfarlane, “Walking and the Wilderness,” interview with Xerez Cook, Purple Magazine, Travel F/W Issue 1 (2014), https://purple.fr/magazine/ travel-issue-1/robert-macfarlane-_-walking-and-the-wilderness/.

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visitors with subtly elevated panoramas of the countryside, which is often marked by the presence of hedgerows typical of the bocage. Cuisset’s work in the Camargue, Europe’s largest river delta, prone to flooding, highlights the extensive presence of water in pictures of canals, irrigation ditches (known locally as roubines), estuaries, lagoons, swampland, salt marshes, and the open sea. A sequence of photographs at the center of the published photobook, aptly entitled Le Pays clair, invites viewers to ponder the vanishing point in a trio of blanched, slightly overexposed images that harness natural light to create unreal effects, confounding the border where land meets the sea, and where earth meets sky (Figure 4.10). Photographs from a series devoted to the commune of La Bouilladisse, in the hills northeast of Marseille, transport us to a territory marked by karst and the scrubland of the garrigue where views of dense pine forests and the rocky limestone cliffs of the Sainte-Baume Massif are interrupted throughout by the sight of small suburban homes swathed in beige stucco and pastel shutters, and topped with red tile roofs (Figure 4.11). Four years earlier, in 2007, Cuisset made a similar series of views around the Hérault département, a little over a two-hour drive away. Here, while still on the edges of the Mediterranean, craggy terrain gives way to comparatively flatter plains and plateaus found not in a single township like La Bouilladisse but throughout an extensive territory marked by sleepy villages and vineyards that contrast starkly with the modern resort communities, replete with disorderly beachfront construction, that Cuisset photographs in Palavas-les-flots and La Grande Motte. And viewers of the series called Écarts will undoubtedly notice an array of cinder cones and lava domes, particular to the Auvergne, that crop up in photographs made around the periphery of Clermont-Ferrand (Figure 4.12). Cuisset’s work asserts the uniqueness of each distinct region, noticeable in certain flora, distinct architectural, agricultural, or natural formations, and through visible effects of climate on both the land and the air around and above it. Throughout these diverse geographies, recurrent markers of Cuisset’s style emerge, like the muted palette of low-saturation, often pale colors (in contrast to Girard’s work, deep reds, for example, are hardly ever present here); the consistent use of expansive depth of field that allows each image to present as much visual information as possible, saturating our gaze and correlating the photograph closely to the real;64

64 In contrast to what Cuisset calls the “disappearance of perspective” in Stéphane Couturier’s practice. See Cuisset, “Les paysages de Thibaut Cuisset,” 110.

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and, time and time again, the presence of the horizon in photographs that are almost exclusively oriented horizontally. As Michel Collot has pointed out, the horizon defines the landscape: “no landscape without it,” he writes.65 Cuisset takes that adage to heart. While the horizon marks an elusive, unreachable frontier, one that appears to join the surface of the earth to the limitless expanse of the sky, the iterative nature of each of Cuisset’s photographic series makes the horizon hard to miss. It manifests concretely near the center of the vertical plane, even in pictures where human-made structures or natural features in the foreground partially occlude the view. The strong presence of the horizon in Cuisset’s work serves as a useful metaphor for the way his art seeks to conjure something from nothing. If, as Jean-Marc Besse suggests, the horizon “reflects the invisible share that dwells in all that is visible,”66 Cuisset’s pictures similarly corral the hidden nature of things that quiver underneath the surface of the real. This is also almost certainly an effect of Cuisset’s embedded approach to photographing vernacular landscapes. Not unlike Thierry Girard, Cuisset is a consummate arpenteur, or surveyor, of place. His way of seeing and meticulously scrutinizing the land by walking over, on, and through it, for extended periods, elicits a form of what Ursula Heise calls “situated knowledge” that can only be gained through “sensory perception and physical immersion.”67 Cuisset’s practice, as he says, involves a fair amount “of wandering, of groping around.”68 Before making any pictures, the photographer scouts the land, covering miles on foot, in an intuitive form of deep noticing and physical sensing of space— what one might even understand as a form of palpation—that attunes him to the subtleties of experience. For Cuisset, as Jean-Christophe Bailly writes, “a territory is not like a news event he has to cover, nor is it a network of clues that he has to gather. It is, rather, a collection of landscapes whose true appearance slowly reveals itself through a series of scenes fixed by each photograph, and which become in essence the 65 Collot, La Pensée-paysage, 91. 66 Besse, Le Goût du monde, 53. 67 Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. In this sense, Cuisset’s practice shares much with Thierry Girard, who wants viewers of his work to be present with him, “at ground level with me in the landscape, so that he or she can almost participate in the physical sensation of it all.” See Thierry Girard, “Les Paysages de Thierry Girard,” 213. 68 Cuisset, “Campagne française/Fragments,” n.pag.

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depiction of a kind of hiding place.”69 Cuisset’s grounded, absorptive approach extols an intimate and hands-on practice of the landscape and relies on a meditative form of attention and attachment to space. His pictures depend on the artist’s composure before a view and, above all, on an indulgence in slowness that allows each place to reveal its secrets on its own time. In Du bon usage de la lenteur, sociologist and philosopher Pierre Sansot offers thoughts that resonate with the way Thibaut Cuisset’s measured photographic “campaigns” attend to place, especially when one considers the etymology of the verb “to attend,” whose Latin root refers to reaching out toward something, a gesture that echoes the attitude of willful luxuriating in slowness that Sansot describes in his book. “Slowness,” Sansot writes, “does not mean the inability to adopt a faster cadence. It can be found in the desire to not rush time, to not be rushed by it, but also to increase our capacity to take the world in without losing ourselves in the process.”70 Cuisset’s deliberate approach to slowness, marked, as he says, by wandering, probing, and an inquisitive process of feeling things out (he uses the verb tâtonner), is a tactic to let the world in, to “greet” it, as Sansot says, to welcome place into his experience so that he can better consider the reverberations it emits. As Cuisset himself has said, implied in each of his images is the goal to express, quite literally, an état d’âme, to “restore as precisely as possible the emotion, the sensation that I felt before a place.”71 While his microspective approach to ordinary landscapes relies on acute observation—”a form of engagement with the world,” as Cronin writes, “which is based on an in-depth analysis and understanding (specere: to look at) of the local (mikros: little)”72—it also seeks to transcend the visual, intellectual, and even the representational by evoking a mood. In making himself available to the landscape, Cuisset’s photographic practice wonders at what phenomenologically inclined thinkers and affect theorists have called “the subtlest of shuttling intensities” and “all the minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed” that shimmer,

69 Bailly, “L’étendue de l’instant (le Japon selon Thibaut Cuisset),” 7. 70 Pierre Sansot, Du bon usage de la lenteur (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2000), 12. 71 Cuisset, “Les Paysages de Thibaut Cuisset,” 114. 72 Cronin, The Expanding World, 1.

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as it were, on the very surface of everyday places and things.73 If Cuisset’s images do not concern themselves overtly with anecdote or meaning—as Bailly writes, they “deliver no message […] in the end, there is nothing to interpret”74—I would argue that they are instead deeply responsive to the affective potential of ordinary landscapes, to the way ordinary landscapes spark what Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affects.”75 This is to say that they are keenly attuned to the many more-than-representational phenomena like “unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions”76 that act upon us and often impel us to act, or to take a photograph, when we, like Thibaut Cuisset, are moved by our experience of a place at a given moment. Especially evocative of this conceit are a pair of images from Une campagne photographique that depict the same view of a landscape in autumn photographed from a country road (the D1) just outside the quaint Normand village of Roncherolles-en-Bray (Figures 4.13 and 4.14). The foreground and bottom third of each image are dominated by a field of brown soil, freshly plowed, whose horizontal striations mimic the horizon line seen, as usual, near the image’s vertical midpoint. The field gives way in the middle ground to a lush emerald meadow and, behind it, a sandy depression, a hillock topped with yet another plowed tract, this one gray, and a copse of barren trees. Cuisset made these two pictures of the Pays de Bray with the same framing a short interval apart, a tactic that he used in other locations as well. When looked at in succession, or side by side, these two photographs reveal the effect, on the ground, in the air, and in the sky, of the clouds passing by overhead. They show the miniscule changes in atmosphere a few minutes make. While ever so subtle, a comparative glance at these two pictures reveals that, in the interim between shots, the clouds have shifted considerably on the wind, revealing from one photograph to the next a different set of shapes and patterns that are reflected throughout. The green field, for example, now seems slightly more yellow, an effect of the changing luminosity on the land. While these two photographs seem to do nothing more than capture a landscape as it exists in two distinct moments of time, 73 Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 1–2. 74 Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Nulle part ailleurs,” in Thibaut Cuisset, Nulle part ailleurs. La Bouilladisse (Marseille: Images en Manœuvres Éditions, 2011), 8. 75 Stewart, Ordinary Affects. 76 Hayden Lorimer, “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-thanRepresentational’,” Progress in Human Geography 29:1 (2005), 84.

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albeit close together, I would suggest that they are emblematic of what Cuisset is attempting to express in his work: namely, the photographer’s “multisensual engagement”77 with the consistently shifting configuration of a landscape as it, quite simply, takes place. Despite all appearances to the contrary, his pictures declare that something is indeed happening in each photograph. Something is happening at once to the landscape, to the artist, and, eventually, to each viewer; something unassuming, indefinite, and undefined that, as Stewart would say, nevertheless “needs attending to.”78 These images, like many others, elicit the artist’s senses as they mingle with the world around him. They catalyze for viewers to see an experience of what cultural geographer John Wylie, writing about the experience of walking through landscape, calls the “configurations of motion and materiality—of light, color, morphology and mood— from which distinctive senses of self and landscape, walker and ground, observer and observed, distill and refract.”79 As philosopher Edward Casey has suggested, place—and, importantly, representation of place—affects subjects experientially: It is not just a matter of “eye and mind” (as Merleau-Ponty felicitously put it) but of the eye—and hand and foot and back and neck, each of these in actual as well as virtual forms of realization […] Wherever place is at stake in human experience there body will be found as well. The same rule obtains when it comes to representing places.80

For Cuisset’s aesthetics, this kind of embodied experience is crucial, and serves as a reminder that the very term “aesthetics,” before it was ever associated with taste and the assessment of beauty in art, “derives from the Greek aesthesis, meaning the perception of the external world through the senses.”81 Cuisset’s representation of place privileges the sensory so that our experience of his photographs may become as “sensible” as possible. As I stated in the Introduction to this book, this does not mean that viewers of his pictures will feel the wind on the 77 Lorimer, “Cultural Geography,” 86. 78 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 5. 79 John Wylie, “A Single Day’s Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30:2 (June 2005), 236. 80 Edward Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xvi. 81 Neal Alexander, “Senses of Place,” in The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, ed. Robert Tally Jr. (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 39.

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face, absorb the humidity through their skin, smell the scents, hear the sounds, or encounter all the sensations that one imagines permeate the places he pictures. Rather, on a more humble and realistic scale, Cuisset’s aesthetic “invites us to be aware of what we see and how the sensible form that is seen supersedes its visible limits.”82 In this sense, his photographs draw out a “mutual entwinement”83 with landscape that encourages viewers to contemplate not simply all that is there to see in the frame, but how they and the places they put on display might make us feel, too. They collectively propose that landscape photography is not just a repository of information to be scrutinized, nor a mere representation of the world as the artist sees it, but a vessel that stores the energy in the landscape waiting to be released, one that prompts us, as we look at these pictures, to consider “all those more hidden sensory and affective processes that allow a view to ‘come into being’ for the subject, all those embodied practices which, prior to representation, allow for its realization.”84 The photographs that comprise Cuisset’s corpus encourage viewers to remain open to how places affect us. They teach us to be aware of how, as Macfarlane puts it, “our minds and our moods and our imaginations and our identities are influenced by the textures and the weathers and the forms and the slopes and the curves and the creatures, remembered and actual, of the places we inhabit.” Which is to say that Cuisset’s work is deeply invested in how, as Macfarlane goes on to say, “the feel of the world influences our feeling of the world.”85 In their decades-long exploration of places marked as much by the gradual evolution of nature as by the impact of humankind, Thierry Girard and Thibaut Cuisset suggest that no matter how scarred, depopulated, or forgotten, no matter how seemingly petrified, overworked, or overbuilt these sites have become with time, landscape nevertheless continues to hum, animated by impulses and sensations, whispers, memories, minor histories, and moods. In their distinct though not mutually exclusive form of microspective envisioning of place, their work provides for an 82 Claire Raymond, 16 Ways of Looking at a Photograph (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), xxiii. 83 Jessica Dubow, from a collective discussion reprinted as “The Art Seminar,” in Landscape Theory, ed. Rachel Ziady DeLue and James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 104. 84 Jessica Dubow, “The Art Seminar,” 104. 85 Robert Macfarlane, “On Landscape and the Human Heart” (lecture, The Tabernacle, London, June 12, 2012). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q1IKO5Ypg&feature=youtu.be.

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expanded understanding of what we might consider French patrimony— traditionally esteemed and earmarked for consideration because of its association with “significant events” and “the great figures of old”86—to include, instead, those deceptively quiet places that attest to the vernacular’s vivacity, density, and allure.

86 Readman, Storied Ground, 4.

chapter five

Roots and Routes Roots and Routes

We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much. —Robert Walser1

In 2004 one of France’s most venerated photographers, Raymond Depardon, aged 62 at the time, initiated a journey that would take him throughout France, on and off again for the next several years. Living out of a van retrofitted for lengthy overnight road trips and equipped with a large-format view camera and a steady supply of sheet film, Depardon roamed for a few weeks at a time, mostly off the beaten path, down quiet country roads, through sleepy villages and on the outskirts of small towns, stopping whenever the view moved him to compose landscape photographs in the myriad subprefectures that proliferate across the nation. Not unlike the places depicted by artists that I discuss elsewhere in this book, many of these excentric zones are not simply less traveled, they are also less traditionally the site of serious photographic inquiry, precisely because of their apparent banality. Depardon’s photographs from this period capitalize on this quality of places that seem sans qualité to catalogue the spatial state of vast swaths of the national territory at the dawn of the twenty-first century. As we shall see, his work also alludes to collective anxieties about the ways a culture is connected to the land, or not, and about what it means to identify with a given territoire. 1 Walser, “A Little Ramble,” Selected Stories, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), 30.

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Depardon’s marathon expedition through France was generously sponsored by both public and private supporters, including the French Ministry of Culture, regional councils, and the French subsidiary of HSBC. Ample funding from these and other sources not only covered the artist’s costs, it also helped give the work the kind of far-reaching visibility that would have surely made many of his contemporaries envious. The money, and the time it afforded, allowed Depardon to traverse massive amounts of terrain and produce an extensive array of images. After traveling 70,000 km across 65 French départements, from the Pas-de-Calais in the north to the Hérault in the south, and from the Doubs in the east to Charente-Maritime in the west, he had amassed over 7,000 photographs, of which around 800 were considered worthy of display. While some were shown over the years in regional exhibits around the country, the artist mounted 36 of these pictures, printed in color and in large-scale format (1.6 m x 2 m), in a showpiece exhibition that included, in a contiguous gallery, a display of the artist’s tripod and view camera, preparatory snapshots, notebooks, and maps that tracked the genesis of the project and provided visitors insight into Depardon’s process. This exhibition, La France de Raymond Depardon, opened at the French National Library in Paris in September 2010. An imposing and hefty catalogue containing reprints of 280 photographs, and an index allowing readers to locate where each shot was taken, was published to accompany the show. This was followed in 2012 by the release of a less grandiose but much more portable, miniature catalogue containing just over 400 photographs, over 100 never displayed before, that allowed admirers of Depardon’s work to carry his vision of France in their pockets.2 If the work by Thierry Girard and Thibaut Cuisset that I discuss in the previous chapter might look somewhat similar to uninitiated viewers 2 Raymond Depardon, La France de Raymond Depardon (Paris: Points, 2012). This book measures roughly 12 by 8 cm. Along with the BNF exhibit and the publication of the catalogue, Depardon and his long-time partner, Claudine Nougaret, also produced a documentary film mixing footage of the artist at work on the road with archival footage from his career as a globetrotting photojournalist (Journal de France, Wild Bunch Films, 2012). The same year, 2012, also saw the publication of another book, Repérages (Paris: Seuil, 2012), devoted to the genesis of the La France project. As if that were not enough, in 2017 Éditions Points released another miniature catalogue, this one entitled Habiter la France de Raymond Depardon, that includes around 200 photographs that Depardon made during the same period, many of which were published in the earlier volumes.

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at first glance, Depardon’s practice diverges significantly. Perhaps most notably, the patient, clinically selective, and painstakingly attentive approach to the territory that typifies the work of Girard and Cuisset stands out against the more spur-of-the-moment routine that Depardon adopted during his national tour: “I am not meticulous and not very patient. I use the view camera like a blunt instrument. I find an angle and boom!”3 While La France signals a major shift in practice for an artist who made a career documenting some of the twentieth century’s most harrowing conflicts around the globe—Depardon’s interest in landscape, though longstanding, is not considered a major aspect of his work4—this self-declared, brutally expedient way of making photographs manifests itself in the sheer mass of images he accumulated between 2006 and 2010, and in the visual characteristics of the pictures themselves. Despite these procedural and stylistic differences, La France contributes in an integral way to the construction of contemporary France’s topographic imaginary. Given the prominence of the exhibition and the publication of its catalogue, both hailed as major cultural events, the series represents French photography’s most mediatized invitation yet “to think about the role of visual culture in shaping understanding of the nature of space, and concomitantly, of French territory and identity.”5 Depardon seems conscious of the impact his work would have, and of the responses it would elicit. The title of his series—Raymond Depardon’s France—is especially charged. It initially smacks of egocentricity and an impulse to master and possess the land. La France de Raymond Depardon has struck some, like the organizers of the France(s) territoire liquide mission, as uncomfortably hegemonic. Yet, as the artist has noted, the impetus was not to impose a megalomaniacal 3 Raymond Depardon, “L’exilé de l’intérieur,” interview with Véronique Brocard and Catherine Portevin, Télérama, special issue 3 (September 2010), 14. Similarly, as Depardon writes in his preface to the France catalogue, “Over time, I learned to stop hesitating. I see a photograph to be made, and from there I move quickly and nothing else seems to exist.” La France (2010), n.pag. 4 Depardon reminds readers of several earlier experiments with large-format landscape photography, notably in a series of images he made as a participant in the DATAR mission near his family home outside Lyon, and later, in the 1990s, with work in Corsica, Normandy, the French Alps, and in the Italian Piedmont. See La France (2010), n.pag. 5 Edward Welch, “La Carte et le territoire: Mapping, Photography and the Visualization of Contemporary France,” Nottingham French Studies 53:2 (2012), 188.

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way of seeing but to envision the nation in a cohesive, albeit singular and idiosyncratic regard, and to propose what he calls a “a sense of unity, the story of our shared everyday lives.”6 Despite the impression of coherence that drives Depardon’s depiction of some of France’s most common places, La France is nevertheless fraught with a fundamental ambivalence. Depardon’s picturing of place strives to be as neutral and nonjudgmental as many of the other photographers discussed in the previous chapters. As Michel Lussault has noted, “He is not heroic, nor particularly empathetic, nor critical, nor even lyrical.”7 But this apparent detachment, an impartiality that lends itself to making so many photographs over such a long period of time in such an expansive area, gives rise to a conception of place that is open to vastly different interpretations. Among the various ways of responding to La France de Raymond Depardon, two dissimilar possibilities rise to the fore. When we consider the hundreds of photographs that Depardon made between 2004 and 2010, pictures that turn commonplace lands into landscape art, one notes a tendency to depict and even to exalt sites that are effectively “without quality,” ostensibly stuck in the past, antiquated and petrified. Certain photographs provide a glance of what parts of France must have looked like decades ago. The enduring visage of dated village storefronts, for example, hints at a conception of place as fixed and immutable (Figure 5.1). The series includes numerous pictures that frame the physiognomy of myriad small businesses, like butcher shops (including an itinerant one), bakeries, hair salons, garages, gas stations, cafés, and convenience stores that look as if they have been around for generations, intricately tied into the local culture and entrenched deeply in the soil on which they stand.8 One could therefore see Depardon’s depiction of these places as the nostalgic projection of a sclerotic nation in gradual 6 Depardon, La France (2012), 22. 7 Michel Lussault, “Regards complices,” interview with Catherine Portevin, Télérama, special issue 3 (September 2010), 51. 8 One might even be reminded of earlier, more expressly wistful photographs of shopfronts made in Paris by Felippe Ferre in the 1980s, images that recall Eugène Atget’s pictures of some of the very same sites from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For his part, Depardon singles out storefront images by Paul Strand and Walker Evans, two giants of American documentary photography that serve as inspiration for some of the photographers included in this book. On Strand’s influence, and his penchant for picturing shopfronts, see Depardon, “La

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decline, grown stubborn and unresponsive to change, and longing for what has been lost. For geographer Armand Frémont, Depardon renders the French countryside archaic, highlighting “a past idealized for its now vanished stability.”9 According to this logic, La France signals an anti-modern decadence that essentializes places where nothing seems to be happening, on the surface at least, as a stable unit of meaning. This is to say that Depardon’s photographic series proposes a way of sensing place that, as historian of photography Liz Wells notes, “is about roots.”10 Unlike the Observatoire photographique du paysage, whose sequential, year-on-year tracking of a given landscape’s mutation over time suggests place’s malleability, Depardon’s photographs seem to posit landscape as a locus for anchoring local culture and identity. I do not mean to suggest that Depardon’s series perpetuates a regionalist or even nationalist understanding of rootedness, or that the work could even be co-opted for that purpose.11 To do so would be to grant the series far too much ideological heft, and to ascribe to it a political posture that, as I argue below, it ultimately intends to resist. Rather, La France can be seen to take rootedness as a structuring metaphor that has historically been associated with both a yearning for the way things used to be and an apprehension about the future.12 On the other hand, if Depardon’s portrait of France suggests a rooted vision of place—a vision given concrete form in the series’s regular depiction of different species of trees that populate the French countryside, and which are occasionally pictured prominently in multiple quadrants of the plane (Figure 5.2)—one could also argue that La France’s portrayal of place offers a reflection on the nation’s spatial

France que j’aime et que j’ai fuie,” interview with Natacha Wolinski, Beaux Arts 316 (2010), 44–5. 9 Armand Frémont, “The Land,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. 2, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 35. 10 Liz Wells, Sense of Place: European Landscape Photography (Munich and London: Prestel, 2012), 248. 11 For more on the relationship between ideas of rootedness and regionalist or nationalist political positions, see Gina Stamm, “For a Literature of ‘Déracinement’,” Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine 19 (2019), 27–36. 12 See Christy Wampole, Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8.

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dynamism and diversity.13 The metaphor of the root as a marker of stagnation can be somewhat misleading. After all, the vegetal life that germinates from roots is hardly as sessile and stuck in place as it may seem. Plants and trees, even the venerable plane trees that Depardon occasionally shows planted at regular intervals along France’s country roads, grow, shift, and stir ever so slowly. Their branches sway in the wind and often shed their leaves. And, as scientists have shown, they live in communities, share and sometimes compete with each other for water and sunlight, and communicate amongst themselves through a complex plexus of motile roots, secretions, and underground fungi, a veritable network of shared interdependency that has come to be known colloquially as the “wood-wide web.”14 Using rootedness as an analogy for sensing landscape, let alone for describing the people who have shaped it over time, is nothing if not problematic. Especially when we consider how notions of rootedness to place have led to irresponsible, even perilous invocations of controversial expressions like français de souche, which refers to the rootstock of a tree and is used to designate citizens of longstanding French lineage. This idiom, deployed most notoriously by French ideologues sympathetic to certain political movements on the extreme right, expresses what its partisans feel is a more profound and authentic brand of national belonging, one that flaunts the ancestral longevity of familial heritage, even though that lineage might be difficult to trace. If, for those ideologues, a sense of place necessarily entails being rooted to the soil, others find the very invocation of rootedness as a metaphor to describe a community’s attachment to place—or a tree’s— as unfortunate as it is absurd.15 As Wells goes on to note, though, sensing place is just as often about the “routes” a community has taken to get to where it is, and which it will continue to travel in the future.16 This alternative metaphor, too, 13 Depardon’s interest in trees is made clear in his short film Mon arbre, produced with his partner Claudine Nougaret as part of the Fondation Cartier’s eclectic 2019 exhibit about trees, Nous les arbres. 14 For a useful introduction to research on the ways plants communicate, nurture one another, and experience stress, see Brandon Keim’s interview with scholar and conservationist Suzanne Simard, “Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees,” Nautilus 77 (October 31, 2019), http://nautil.us/issue/77/underworldsnbsp/ never-underestimate-the-intelligence-of-trees. 15 See, for example, Jean-Christophe Bailly’s critique of the rootedness metaphor in Le Dépaysement, 438. 16 Wells, Sense of Place, 248.

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takes on concrete form quite literally in many more of Depardon’s photographs. For if certain places pictured in the series seem stuck in a conservative vision of a nation where roots run deep, one cannot help but notice another recurring leitmotif, namely a proliferation of asphalt routes that collectively suggest alternative pathways for understanding. While trees and their roots crop up from time to time in Depardon’s images, there is hardly a photograph in La France where a road, or a portion of it, is not visible.17 Whether straight, curving, or sinuous, made of loose gravel or paved over in macadam, stopping short at an impasse or stretching out into the distance, these roads allow the peripatetic photographer to access remote destinations across what the series imagines to be a “limitless territory” (Figure 5.3).18 Viewing these images invites speculation about where these roads may lead. Thankfully, ample signage points travelers in the direction of nearby villages, towns, and major cities farther afield. The presence of road signs throughout La France announces, over and over again, numerous possible itineraries and viable directions of travel (Figure 5.4). It is difficult to look at the photographs that comprise La France and not be consistently reminded of Depardon’s vehicular peregrinations. As he said in his film Journal de France, “to photograph France is to drive and drive.” To peruse the pages of its catalogues, hundreds of images in all, is to get the impression of moving through space with the artist. Not unlike Camille Fallet’s ambulation around the Parisian periphery, which I discuss in Chapter Two, Depardon’s project circulates across the nation, carefully avoiding major population hubs, city centers, and canonized points of interest to privilege, instead, “this third France that we hardly speak of, these 400 micro-regions that make up the territory.”19 In its impressive accretion of places along a circuit of roads less traveled, La France brings to the fore details about the territory that make each site unique. So many details, in fact, that it becomes virtually impossible to pin down any essence. The series ceaselessly works to displace, destabilize, dislocate, and even to uproot 17 Depardon is aware of this common theme: “I always have a lot of ground in my frame […] I have to deal with sidewalks, road markings, and other fittings installed by the Department of Transportation.” See La France (2012), 21. Elsewhere, Depardon notes more succinctly that his images are marked by “less sky and more ground.” See Depardon, “La France que j’aime et que j’ai fuie,” 45. 18 Michel Lussault, in Depardon, La France (2012), 29. 19 Depardon, “La France que j’aime et que j’ai fuie,” 44.

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its viewers, sometimes to the point of disorientation. But I would argue that it posits this disorientation as beneficial, since it provides viewers an opportunity to change their perspective on portions of the territoire that receive little attention, encouraging us to identify the many features that saturate this common ground. While it might seem to depict certain French places as bounded and static, seemingly stuck in neutral, idling interminably on a road to nowhere, at the same time Depardon’s project recalibrates that vision and—thanks in part to its great mobility—challenges the historically dominant idea of place “as a center of meaning connected to a rooted and ‘authentic’ sense of identity.”20 La France may therefore acknowledge its potential for nostalgia. But it also resists this retrograde vision of a nation of archetypical landscapes stuck in the past and hints, instead, at a more expansive and inclusive approach that embraces what France has become and celebrates its future. As the editor of a special issue of Télérama devoted to Depardon’s exhibit argues, “As if he were addressing those who would choose to associate the landscape with a uniform vision of ‘French identity,’ Depardon responds by suggesting harmony in the composite, proposing a geography of small differences and minute details.”21 As we will see, the tension elicited by these two opposing ways of envisioning place—moored by roots and liberated by routes—echoes a divided politics in French society. Picture Postcards The nostalgic potential of Depardon’s photographs manifests in more than the representation of moribund village shops. It is notable, too, in the series’s almost ritualistic devotion to what Armand Frémont calls “silences” that haunt the landscape and figure much of what we see as ruins of the contemporary.22 These silences are made possible not simply by the fact that Depardon avoids all major population centers, including, notably, the whole of the Île-de-France region, but also by the 20 Cresswell, Place, 13. 21 Catherine Portevin, “Chambre avec vues,” Télérama, special issue 3 (September 2010), 3. 22 Armand Frémont, “Hexagone à géographie variable,” Télérama, special issue 3 (September 2010), 65.

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absence of people in the frame. Save for occasional counterexamples— in which we glimpse, say, two children kicking a soccer ball on a field; a gathering of passersby intently watching plumes of smoke rise from a house fire; a mechanic in front of his shop in the Jura; and a portrait of the proud owners of a hardware store in Montreuil in the Pas-deCalais, which Depardon also shoots to great effect without the owners posed in front—Depardon’s vision of the French landscape is almost entirely devoid of inhabitants. “I was careful not to use human beings as ornaments.”23 This is a considerable shift in the photographer’s practice, given his historic interest in human subjects. As he notes, after years of working as a photojournalist, and having documented through his feature-length films the experiences and words of people around the world, in various institutions, and in rural France, “It was my choice to photograph people so infrequently […] I wanted to return to the silence of photography.”24 La France evokes this stillness in a few arresting ways. Isolated rural villages seem haunted by decades-old monuments to local war dead. Lonely snack shops and bars-tabacs from another era lack patrons. From region to region, despite their diverse architectural features, dwellings, their shutters often closed, feel uninviting and disengaged from the world (Figure 5.5). Cloudy skies make for a doleful climate. Narrow streets are deserted, as if frozen in time. Markers of industry are virtually absent. Even though many stores are open for business, economic activity seems limited. “For sale” and “for rent” signs are rampant. Life in these pictures has come to a standstill, turning villages into ghost towns, sites of a calamitous misadventure where place has been hollowed out and nothing but an eerie sense of calm reigns. La France seems here to portray the nation as an assemblage of forsaken territories steeped in melancholy and destined for abandonment. For some critics, Depardon has effectively turned rural France into a museum dedicated to an outmoded era and dominated by “all kinds of relics.”25 Art historian Michel Poivert suggests that the traditionalist 23 Raymond Depardon, “Travailler à la chambre, c’est comme peindre sur un chevalet,” interview with Fabien Simode, L’œil 628 (October 2010), 77. 24 Depardon, La France (2010), n.pag. Depardon began to shy from representing people in his images in the mid-1990s, when his interest in photojournalism started to wane. 25 Michel Poivert, “Hôtel France. Conversation avec Michel Houellebecq et Marc Lathuillière,” Mouvement 78 (July–August 2015), 58.

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nature of Depardon’s vision is accentuated by the “vintage” quality of the images themselves. This is perhaps most notable in the color scheme. While Depardon has expressed his enthusiasm for the surprisingly vibrant colors that mark the French countryside, and argues that color images are what makes his pictures resist the more backwardlooking associations of black and white,26 the series’s outmoded tones lend an artificial, almost pixelated impression of cleanliness that echo, for Poivert, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s similarly retrograde depiction of Montmartre in his popular film from 2001, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. The oversaturated chromatic scale is visible in the deep yellows, reds, blues, and greens painted onto surfaces that pop and illuminate the frame, especially in sites Depardon photographs in low light or after a rainstorm. These often tacky colors give the work a picture postcard aesthetic, the kind that art historian Jean-François Chevrier disdains because the postcard is a medium that traditionally devalues and renders innocuous the subject it figures.27 Neither impressionistic like Cuisset nor avant-garde and optically vertiginous like Couturier, one could argue that Depardon’s quaint portrait of the nation, inspired in part by the old black-and-white postcards of rural France that he collected and consulted in preparation for the project,28 suits the landscapes he photographs because, in this way, the medium is as demoded as the message it transmits. Hardly a progressive vision of the provinces, the photographs seem intent on steeping these places in a slowly souring brine, imagining “a France that has been cooked and preserved in its own fat, trapped, in a sense, in its ill will toward those who would prefer to see it break free from its geographic comfort zone.”29 For his part, writer (and occasional photographer of the French territoire) Michel Houellebecq is struck by the sentimental nature of Depardon’s landscapes, “as if [Depardon] were searching for childhood 26 “I was most surprised by the incredible colors one finds on rural shop fronts. Their effect is almost political in that they call out to us and say, ‘Hey! We are here, we exist too. We might not have a subway, but we are modern.’” See Depardon, “Travailler à la chambre,” 77. 27 Magali Nachtergael and Anne Reverseau, “Cartes postales. Une anthropologie sauvage des images,” L’art même 78 (2019), 57–9. 28 Readers of Repérages will note in the opening pages that Depardon makes clear that the purchase and analysis of postcards was an integral part of his scouting process. 29 Lussault, Habiter, 9.

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memories.”30 For Houellebecq, however, La France is not so much mired in the nostalgia of Jeunet’s portrait of Montmartre in the early 2000s, a film whose aesthetic evokes the Paris populaire of the interwar period and 1940s, but rather in the period of post-war economic expansion and development known as the Trente Glorieuses. Depardon’s countryside is “contaminated” by artifacts of aménagement du territoire from the 1950s and 1960s, of which roads are just one part. Bridges and viaducts, low-income housing estates, middle-class single-family homes and beachfront property developments, power lines, public playgrounds, and ports all make an appearance here. Though the impact this kind of development has had on the French economy, on the landscape, and on the way people practice the places they inhabit in their daily lives is significant, for Houellebecq, Depardon’s vision is not only wistful, it looks entirely out of place in an increasingly complex world. One has only to compare what Houellebecq thinks is Depardon’s disconsolate vision to the starkly divergent image of exuberance associated with the world’s fastest developing economies, most notably in Asia. In typically provocative fashion, however, Houellebecq does not so much disparage Depardon’s fondness for the past as admire its shrewdness, because it seems so counterintuitive. If La France turns the countryside into a museum, in doing so it basks in peripheral France’s unmatched commercial appeal as a well-preserved homage to a bygone era. La France de Raymond Depardon is perfectly adapted to the market because this is exactly what foreign visitors desire. As Houellebecq notes: We sell to Asian, Brazilian, and Russian tourists what they want from France based on what they might have seen in the movies (Amélie Poulain) or on television (the Tour de France) […] The paradox of Raymond Depardon’s work is that, in the care he takes to compose his images, in the use of a large-format camera, he manages to canonize these landscapes of modernity from the 1950s and 1960s and consecrate them as national heritage.31

Instead of competing with other nations that are advancing at a far more rapid pace, Depardon’s vision of a country savvy enough to cash in on “an ecological niche” doubles down on the potential attraction of France’s landscapes, even at their most ordinary. Houellebecq thus sees 30 Houellebecq, qtd. in Poivert, “Hôtel France,” 58. 31 Houellebecq, qtd. in Poivert, “Hôtel France,” 58.

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La France’s passéism as a positive, even though he reduces Depardon’s attention to French places to nothing more than a response to the laws of “a new global economic order.” But what if Depardon’s photographic portrait of France were perhaps less cynical than Michel Houellebecq would have us believe? La France périphérique de Raymond Depardon In two important studies published in the early 2010s, social geographer Christophe Guilluy recalibrates our understanding of what he refers to as “peripheral France.”32 While located beyond the major metropoles in “invisible and forgotten” rural areas, small and mid-size cities, and entirely unremarkable peri-urban zones, these territories, he argues, are in fact important actors in the restructuring of French society.33 While Guilluy concedes that the media and dominant classes in France— which is another way of referring to the inhabitants of its big cities and, especially, the capital—often perceive these spaces as representative of “an archaic and underrepresented France that is still clinging on but is ultimately destined to disappear,” he suggests to the contrary that these are also places characterized by their “demographic dynamism. From here on out, this will be the epicenter for debates about French society. These are the places where the future of the new working and middle classes will be decided.”34 In other words, these are the places destined to determine the future of France. Guilluy’s work suggests how important a role maligned territories have played and will likely continue to play in the ongoing formation of France in the coming years. Could we not then see in Depardon’s photographs a visual cultural corollary to the portrait of peripheral France that Guilluy’s work represents, and which similarly strives to make these sites newly intelligible to a public living elsewhere? Might one even read the absence of human figures in La France’s pictures as an incisive commentary on the fact that, as Guilluy reminds us, these places are nevertheless home to over 60 percent of the nation’s population? 32 See Christophe Guilluy, Fractures françaises (Paris: Flammarion, 2013) and La France périphérique. Comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 33 Guilluy, La France périphérique, 11. 34 Guilluy, Fractures françaises, 107.

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Like Guilluy’s social geography, La France resists attempts to pigeonhole spaces that lie outside the cities. Depardon’s vision of France is too expansive in scope for that. Though occasional patterns emerge,35 the initial exhibition and catalogue of La France do not organize the images into typologies (in the way that an artist like Camille Fallet does in his portrait of the Parisian banlieue, which I discuss in Chapter Two). The series refuses facile hierarchies, attending as earnestly to an industrial park as to a village square, privileging the transitory as much as the immutable: “The most invariant manifestations of ‘eternal’ France coexist in the same image with the most fleeting of everyday signs.”36 The challenge, what one critic called Depardon’s “impossible wager,”37 is to represent the Hexagon’s peripheral spaces in all their diversity. While small villages and other nondescript places abound, and constitute one of the project’s major focal points, the series posits their accrual as a form of bounty among an even wider array of topographies. There is more to what we could call, following Guilluy, “La France périphérique de Raymond Depardon” than images of empty towns fading into irrelevance. For many other kinds of places turn up here, too. Some photographs seem acutely aware of their capacity to appeal. Beaches that dot France’s coastlines on the English Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean are inviting, even in the off-season. Downtown pedestrian zones, seaside marinas, and the crystal-clear waters of the lake at Annecy beckon. Our eyes wander over green pastures and rolling fields. Craggy, snow-capped peaks glimmer in the distance while, in the foreground, a mountain stream passes under a footbridge in the village center. Sunny days in the Hérault could fool us into thinking the image was made in the more epicurean regions of eastern Provence, and an attractively designed outdoor aquatics center teems with lap swimmers as the city of Dieppe looks on in the background (Figure 5.6). Considered together, these photographs represent the reality of the territoire as much as those pictures of more sullen locales that I mention earlier. And like those pictures, these, too, 35 For example, the titles of Michel Lussault’s short texts that serve to organize the images in the 2012 Points “pocket” edition of Depardon’s catalogue suggest a certain number of common motifs, like “Bric-a-Brac,” “Colors,” “Effigies,” and “Shores.” 36 Joachim Lepastier, “La France sans qualités de Raymond Depardon,” Cahiers du cinéma 665 (March 2011): 16. 37 Frémont, “Hexagone à géographie variable,” 65.

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revel in their singularity. In their forensic focus on details, they show what makes each place unique. As such, they discourage viewers from drawing any definitive conclusions about a place’s status. As Michel Lussault remarks, viewers inclined to a defeatist and cynical form of nostalgia will find much to identify with in Depardon’s pictures, and will no doubt become mired “in perpetual sorrow, in a state of bemoaning and embitterment about what once was and is never coming back.” But that is hardly our only choice. For nostalgia can also stimulate thinking about the future, about what might be next for a nation in perpetual evolution: “Our nostalgia can be fertile and allow us to move forward, to live happily while we wait for our lives to end, to transmit memories to our children, all those various life stories that they will have to learn to process.”38 The photograph of the Bains de Dieppe evokes well the play between nostalgia and progress that mark Depardon’s entire series. For in the background of that image viewers will note one of the last remaining bastions of the city’s fifteenth-century ramparts, the Porte des Tourelles, flanked by a Mercure Hotel on the right and, on the left, the Nouvelle Casino, the latest iteration of the famous gambling hall that was first built on this site overlooking the English Channel in the nineteenth century and later destroyed during the Second World War. That said, no image is perhaps more symbolic (and more unassuming) of the kind of forward thinking that Lussault champions than the roundabout (Figure 5.7). This road feature, often decorated or equipped with some form of unique ornamentation to mark the entrance into (or exit out of) an agglomeration, makes a regular appearance throughout La France. This is not surprising considering that, having invented the roundabout, the French have built more of them per capita than any other nation on earth.39 Depardon is intrigued by their universality, by their placement on the edges of cities and towns, and perhaps even by their form. And he clearly delights in using public and private funding to highlight their unheralded virtues.40 The roundabout is an apparatus for movement and circulation. 38 Lussault, Habiter, 9. 39 Sylvie Bommel, “La France, terre de ronds-points,” Le Parisien, August 12, 2013, http://www.leparisien.fr/week-end/la-france-terre-de-ronds-points-12-08-2013 -3047581.php. 40 “I am happy to have spent money from the state, from various regional authorities, and from banks on pictures that bring to light the corner of a street, a bakery, or a roundabout that will never figure in any tourist brochure.” Depardon,

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Or at least that is how their designers intend them to function. Regardless of how well traffic flows around them, the roundabout by its nature is antithetical to the one-way street. As writer François Bon notes, the roundabout disperses, propels, and “reconditions orientation.”41 But its presence as a motif in La France is also prescient, especially when we consider Depardon’s series in the context of Guilluy’s work that I mention above. When Depardon was photographing these places in the early 2000s, unrest was brewing in a nation becoming more and more “fractured,” as Guilluy’s 2010 study argues convincingly. But neither geographer nor photographer could have anticipated that the rond-point would become the rallying point for a frustrated citizenry, many of whom donned their yellow traffic safety vests and began uniting in solidarity in the fall of 2019 on and around roundabouts on the outskirts of hundreds of cities and towns all over France. For historian Pierre Vermeren, by choosing to occupy roundabouts to express their distrust of the government and disappointment at having been left behind by society, having initially chosen these sites to mobilize passing motorists against a proposed hike to the tax rate levied on gasoline, the gilets jaunes, as they came to be known, effectively transformed the rond-point into a topographical emblem of a more widespread “French malaise.”42 In their creative and improbable appropriation of the roundabout as a locus of struggle and revolt, the protesters showed, perhaps unwittingly, how even the most static and uninspiring of common places are in fact more open, porous, and potentially transformative than they seem.43 I would propose that Depardon’s work in La France implies a similar “La France que j’aime et que j’ai fuie,” 45. The photographs of traffic circles in La France resonate with a photograph of a roundabout from an earlier series focused on his family farm north of Lyon that Depardon produced as part of the Mission photographique de la DATAR in the 1980s. See Farmer, Rural Inventions, 109. 41 François Bon, “Le Tour de Tours en 80 ronds-points,” Le Tiers livre, web et littérature, September 15, 2014, https://tierslivre.net/spip/spip.php?article4023. 42 Pierre Vermeren, “Les Ronds-points, symbole de la France moche et emblème du malaise français,” Le Figaro, December 18, 2018, https://www.lefigaro.fr/ vox/societe/2018/12/18/31003-20181218ARTFIG00265-pierre-vermeren-les-rondspoints-symbole-de-la-france-moche-et-embleme-du-malaise-francais.php. 43 While the yellow vest movement began on roundabouts across the country, shortly after, in the fall and winter of 2018/2019, even larger protests would be organized in cities around the country. The rond-point thus served as a launching pad for mass demonstrations that would rock the center of Paris every weekend for months.

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position, aligning itself with what cultural geographer Doreen Massey calls an “always unfixed, contested and multiple” vision of place.44 As I have suggested, the series is committed to rendering those lesser-seen sites more visible, in much the same way that work by Guilluy is committed to revealing the political potency of those who call many of these places home. The photographs of La France not only hint at the resilience of these places in a time of great upheaval and change, a period marked as much by disappearance and loss as it was by renewal and resurgence, they marvel at place’s capacity to adapt to, and be adapted by, the times. On the Road with Bailly and Depardon As we have seen in previous chapters, writer, thinker, and former professor of urban and landscape studies Jean-Christophe Bailly writes often about the ties that bind us to place. Between 2008 and 2010, just as Depardon was traveling the routes of rural and peri-urban France in his van, Bailly also set out on his own tour of France, notebook in hand, with a similar goal in mind: namely, to ascertain a certain coherence and assess the national state of place in his own way by locating, in his prose, a set of affects, faint echoes, and subtle vibrations that lie beneath the surface of things seen in places that we often neglect but which, somehow, if we stop to look and listen, hint at the singularity of France. One wonders if these two dynamic artists from the same generation, traversing the country independently embarked on two distinct yet surprisingly convergent pursuits, might have unknowingly crossed paths. In 2011, several months after Depardon’s La France exhibition debuted at the French National Library, Bailly published Le Dépaysement. Voyages en France, a genre-bending text that melds travel diary, philosophical essay, and lyrical prose poem into one. In Le Dépaysement, Bailly recounts and reflects upon the 34 “incursions” he made during his own two-year, self-funded ramble to sites across the Hexagon. Le Dépaysement was praised unanimously by the French press and awarded the Prix Décembre, confirming its author’s prominence in the world of French letters. 44 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 5.

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While Depardon’s photographs and Bailly’s book deviate in a few ways, they also share a striking number of affinities that are worth exploring.45 At their core, each ponders the nature of the nation, and the shared space of the territoire. They seek to bring to light the matter—visual and topographic, to be sure, but also cultural and historical—that makes France “France.” Both resist the charming clichés and stereotypical commonplaces that tend to cloud our experience and understanding of the country.46 Instead, as Bailly writes in the conclusion to Le Dépaysement, echoing Depardon’s own motivation, the aim of his project “is to seek to pinpoint this thing [France], to trace its formation, from the distant past to today, and to identify how it functions and how it continues to survive.”47 Considering the two together reveals a shared understanding of the ways place and landscape figure in the construction of a national imaginary that is wary of tropes like fixity and stasis and which advocates, rather, a more multivalent and dynamic understanding of the territoire. As Lussault notes, “What Depardon shows and Bailly 45 Given his adherence to an experience of landscape that relies on patience and an openness to letting things take their course—an approach that aligns itself well with work by Thierry Girard and Thibaut Cuisset that I discuss in Chapter Four— it is not surprising that Bailly has criticized Depardon’s excess of intentionality. As he writes, “Depardon was on the lookout for an image of France that he wanted to spot, actively, rather than letting it simply appear or arise. Of course, this does not prevent us from finding his work interesting.” Bailly, “Écriture de la lumière,” in Paysages variations. Autour du paysage comme variation artistique, ed. Manola Antonioli, Vincent Jacques, and Alain Milon (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2014), 39. Michel Lussault, however, notes a number of traits that Bailly and Depardon share: “Same initial inquiry, same partiality for everyday things, and for rambling about. Same acuity and lucid gaze, never nostalgic but often melancholic. Same intent to highlight the extraordinary variety of spaces, same desire to go off the beaten path, to eschew what has already been seen and reseen in favor of what resides outside of our usual frame of vision. It is as if Bailly and Depardon were two sides of the same coin.” Lussault, “La France dans tous les sens,” Le Monde, April 21, 2011, https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2011/04/21/la-france-dans-tous-lessens_1510703_3260.html. 46 Bailly denounces stereotypes about France or the French, from those, “grounded strictly in ideology (‘land of liberty,’ for example), to those, simply dubious, that peddle a kind of narcissistic thoughtlessness about, say, gastronomic prowess or the idea that the French are Cartesian.” Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 9. 47 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 387. As Depardon has said, “My challenge was to confront the question ‘what does it mean to speak about France today?’” See Depardon, “L’exilé de l’intérieur,” 14.

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demonstrates is that it would be deceptive to impose a univocal vision of France, of this nation traversed and worked over by all the tendencies of modernization, however unpleasant it might be for those nostalgics yearning for stability and order.”48 Not only do La France and Le Dépaysement offer a forward-thinking view of an evolving nation, they also serve as a redemptive countermeasure to bellicose claims about the decline and inevitable “deculturation” of France made by a few outspoken critics whose overtly conservative and lamentable yearning for a return to origins seems in comparison not only retrograde and reactionary, but altogether dangerous. Shunning set itineraries, both Bailly and Depardon drift through France on zigzagging trajectories, an erratic kind of wandering guided not by any specific destination but rather, as Bailly writes, by “whimsy” and “disorder.”49 Equipped with drivers’ licenses and access to high-speed rail, author and photographer clearly delight in the accidental and the contingent, not unlike their contemporary W.G. Sebald, whose peregrinations around the extreme east of England often led to fortuitous finds, or the Surrealists and Situationists before them who enjoyed the psychogeoraphic potential of aimless urban strolls. What emerges in La France and Le Dépaysement, however, is far from the marvelous or the fantastic. Rather, a sort of internal logic comes to the fore, a vision of France laid bare, at its most fundamental. Like Depardon, Bailly’s promenades explore a disparate set of sites, often singular, scattered across the land. These are mostly “lukewarm” places, as Bailly calls them,50 that resist the picturesque in favor of the more starkly mundane: nondescript towns, uncomfortably silent streets, or lost little cemeteries by the train tracks. Unusual sites are a source of enchantment. In an early chapter on Toulouse, for example, Bailly’s focus is not on the Capitole, a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture surrounded by a magnificent plaza in the city’s center, but the bazacle. This small hydroelectric power station a few blocks away also contains a modest museum where visitors can learn about the energy industry’s impact on local biodiversity. To Bailly’s delight, visitors might glimpse a few fish in the Garonne River through a tiny porthole found in the portion of the museum constructed below the surface of the water. When Bailly ventures into known territory, it is usually the margins that interest 48 Lussault, “La France dans tous les sens,” n.pag. 49 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 201. 50 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 203.

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him. In Paris he strays far from the city center, preferring instead to wander the outskirts near one of those rare pedestrian bridges like the Passerelle du Cambodge that cross the ring road to link Paris proper to the bordering suburb of Gentilly. Like many of the photographic series I discuss elsewhere in this book, and especially in Depardon’s visual portrait of France, the many common places that populate the pages of Bailly’s book are, for the most part, topographic afterthoughts, places that deflect our gaze but which almost always hide, “in their discretion and seeming lack of qualities, something fascinating.”51 These are the kinds of sites where one simply ends up sometimes, where the apparent lack of energy is unsettling at first but becomes, for both Bailly and Depardon, a sight to behold. Reading about these places in Le Dépaysement or looking at photographs of them in Depardon’s catalogue, one might be reminded of Georges Perec’s thoughts on the infraordinary, to which we give no credence because it is too often outshone by the phenomenal. Perec bemoans this unjust state of affairs. Why favor the grand, the epic, when we spend the great majority of our time living in the banal? Wouldn’t we all do better, Perec asks, to wrest those “common things” from “the dross in which they remain mired”? Depardon’s images, especially those that reward keen viewers with an array of everyday details—a shiny gutter here, a banner for a local agricultural fair there—would have made Perec proud because they encourage us to take them seriously, to “give them meaning, a language, so that they can finally speak for themselves, and to us.”52 Even Depardon’s photographs of monuments to the dead, religious effigies, and other unusual sights like a model of the Statue of Liberty designed to liven up a routine roundabout are located in spaces that are seemingly oblivious to them, that deprive them of the attention they deserve.53 These are the kinds of things one might catch only a fleeting glance of while driving through a town, or from the window of a moving train. But Depardon chooses to observe them from a standstill, to frame these views and envision them with his camera, just as Bailly does with his words. Here what one encounters during the journey is 51 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 203. 52 Georges Perec, “Approches de quoi?”, in L’Infra-ordinaire (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 11. 53 However, in this photograph taken on a road leading into Colmar, the statue’s placement is hardly arbitrary, for Colmar is the birthplace of the statue’s designer, Frédéric Bartholdi. See Figure 5.7 above.

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as important as the destination. Here, as influential landscape theorist J.B. Jackson once suggested, “roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places.”54 Both Bailly and Depardon acknowledge the many pastoral landscapes that the French countryside has to offer. Several images published in Depardon’s catalogue pay subtle homage to the long history of picturesque landscape painting, without quite being picturesque themselves.55 For his part, Bailly writes often about the natural world and Le Dépaysement includes chapters devoted to forests, mountains, and, especially, rivers. Both advocate vigorously for the intermediary zones that are a constituent yet often ignored part of France: “scorned and known by all, the France of roundabouts and country roads with their typical shoulder markings. There is not a French person who would not recognize at least some part of these photographs.”56 As many of Depardon’s images of seemingly humdrum sites remind us, this is what a large part of the national territory looks like. This is France at its most idiosyncratic, but also at its most familiar. If Le Dépaysement and La France choose to focus on similar content, they also adopt surprisingly complementary approaches to form. Even despite their postcard aesthetic and emphasis on frontality, Depardon’s photographs nevertheless exhibit exceptional precision 54 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 190. 55 For example, a photograph of the white chalk cliffs at Étretat, which Depardon includes near the end of the catalogue for La France, recalls a series of canvases by both Monet and Courbet. Though Depardon’s picture, a view of the cliffs and the sea that includes a tourist telescope that seems to dare viewers to use it, is more self-reflexive, keenly aware of what this site has become (thanks to canonical views of the place produced, precisely, by artists like Monet and Courbet). 56 Raymond Depardon, “La France ne change plus vite qu’on ne le pense,” interview with Valérie Duponchelle and Sébastien Le Fol, Le Figaro, September 27, 2010, http://www.lefigaro.fr/culture/2010/09/27/03004-20100927ARTFIG00409depardon-la-france-change-plus-vite-qu-on-ne-le-pense.php. In this interview, Depardon tends to universalize a particular notion of Frenchness that is nothing if not problematic, and paradoxical, especially since his words echo discourses of rootedness to the land that, as I argue above, La France ultimately seeks to challenge. When he says, further on, “We have all been here. We were born here. We remember these places,” he sees the landscape through a prism that presupposes a certain identity garnered through an innate connection to the land, effectively denying that identity to French citizens that were not, in fact, born in France.

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and depth of field that invites viewers to enter the image optically and wander languorously down narrow streets, or country roads, off into the distance. While these are not narrative photographs, the clarity, size, and ground-level perspective of the printed images discourages viewers from glancing quickly and moving on. Instead, each picture lures spectators to observe a constellation of contiguous vectors, side to side, front to back, top to bottom, foreground to background, in a visual amble aided by the mind’s eye. Given Jean-Christophe Bailly’s interest in photography, and his frequent collaboration with a select cohort of contemporary photographers, it is not surprising that Le Dépaysement, an implicit photo-text of sorts, adopts photography “and its indexical substance” as a principal structuring metaphor. In the book’s first chapter, the author refers to his writing practice as an attempt to “develop what we might be able to call a mobile snapshot of the nation.”57 Like the process that unfolds when a sheet of photographic paper is exposed to light and placed into developing solution, or when a Polaroid emerges fresh from the camera after the snapshot is taken, the thought-images in Bailly’s book crystallize gradually. His prose gives form and shape to the locales under his scrutiny. Like in his chapter on the Loue River, which begins with a discussion of the river’s source not far from Ornans, birthplace of Gustave Courbet, who painted several versions of the scene he found there in the 1860s. The chapter then winds its way down the Loue toward Arc-et-Senans, where Bailly explores Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks, a masterpiece of French engineering. This site is not far from Salins-les-Bains, where he then reflects on a small public park that seems to distill “a very subtle and very steadfast memory, or rather a kind of omen, of all the dreams dreamt in this region.”58 Le Dépaysement, clearly informed by romantic encounters with nature, is also decidedly Proustian. It often hints at how places are composed of layers of history and memory, like a palimpsest, where the past, 57 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 14. Elsewhere, he likens his writing process more generally to making a photograph. See Jean-Christophe Bailly, “Tout passe, rien ne disparaît,” interview with Suzanne Doppelt, Jérôme Lèbre, and Pierre Zaoui, Vacarme 50 (Winter 2010), 4–12. For more on the explicit and implicit connections between photography and Le Dépaysement, see Ari J. Blatt, “Un territoire truffé de traces,” Nouvelles francographies 5:1 (2015), 49–68; and Jean-Pierre Montier, “L’usage de la photo chez Jean-Christophe Bailly,” Revue Europe 1046–8 (June– August 2016), 164–74. 58 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 320.

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vibrating below the surface, is projected out into the present, a present that Bailly understands as a veritable outcropping of lost time. While Depardon’s images, a visual counterpart to Bailly’s prose, are less overtly concerned with history and memory, they nevertheless seek to evoke, “in a contemplative or even sometimes simple-minded fashion,”59 how landscape bears the trace of generations of inhabitation. Political Landscapes Both Depardon’s pictures and Bailly’s verbal evocations of place render the ordinary worthy of our consideration. But this gesture masks a subtle critique. Landscapes mostly devoid of people might seem to resist ideological associations. However, not unlike Bailly’s discussion of the Loue, a river that runs for miles beneath the surface of the earth before emerging in a source, a latent sociopolitical message subtends these projects. As art historian Deborah Bright suggested in a landmark 1985 essay on reading representations of the landscape, we should not be lulled into believing that images like these cannot be anything other than a reflection of the artist’s sensibility or technical virtuosity. Landscapes, she notes, also and almost inherently reflect “collective interests and influences.”60 As Edward Welch has similarly argued, photographs of places that collectively propose to constitute an imagined national “portrait” often adopt a critical position: “To make a portrait of a nation is to make an intervention in the public sphere, to make public the state of the nation.”61 What begins to emerge from reading Bailly’s writerly “portrait” alongside Depardon’s visual profile of France is not only a sensitive approach to our world, but a critical stance. As Michel Lussault writes, the work in both projects is led by what the places depicted “offer as a an outlet, as a stimulus for daydreams, sensations, and reflection, even if it means that in our contemplation we are led to meander and often 59 Depardon, La France (2010), n.pag. 60 Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 126. 61 Edward Welch, “Portrait of a Nation: Depardon, France, Photography,” Journal of Romance Studies 8:1 (Spring 2008), 23.

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wind up far away from the point where we began.”62 I would add that this approach is not only thoughtful, but refreshingly optimistic as well, because neither artist chooses to lament the disappearance of a defunct era. Certain chapters in Le Dépaysement and images in La France consider cultural vestiges as they are slowly dispatched by the relentless passage of time. For example, Depardon’s melancholic images of village storefronts recall Bailly’s passage on a neighborhood not far from Fontainebleau’s majestic chateau where he writes of two small businesses, “Speed Auto” and “World of Dogs,” that appear out of place and frozen, as if from another time, “forgotten, lost, and not even worth saving.”63 But they also suggest that the past hardly ever truly passes for good. Remnants emanate in a land that has the fortune of being, as Bailly says, “riddled with stories.”64 Rather than grumble about bygone days, I would suggest that both Depardon and Bailly celebrate France as it is, revisiting these places that deserve our attention, reveling in the constant unfolding and change that is characteristic of the nation, “not to set our mind at rest, but as a way to discover the echo of truth that dislodges itself in these moments.”65 The disorientation and dépaysement that is a necessary result of this form of progress is not disheartening but joyous. Both Bailly and Depardon, in the sheer topographic diversity of their approaches, in their attempts to paint a portrait of France, challenge a conservative yearning for consistency, preferring instead to envision a country that resists any one essence, a territoire that reveals a more naturally fluid and at times even elusory kind of truth. Privileging the metaphor of routes over roots, Le Dépaysement and La France oppose the attempt to configure a finite form of French national identity, a topic that sparked a highly contested debate in France in the 2000s. I remind readers here of the crisis ignited by the appointment by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy of a minister of “Immigration, Integration, and National Identity.” This post would eventually be dismantled in 2010, just three years after its creation, in part because its association of the first and third terms was vehemently criticized as problematic, if not altogether xenophobic. Depardon, writing in the introduction to his exhibition catalogue, anticipated that his work could disappoint some spectators incapable of associating what 62 Lussault, “La France dans tous les sens,” n.pag. 63 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 116. 64 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 12. 65 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 12.

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his pictures represent with their own reality, or imagined reality, of the nation: “I took the risk of upsetting those who will not recognize their France in these pictures, and of delighting those who can appreciate an intuitive way of seeing, irreducible to any one fixed definition of French identity.”66 Bailly, more forcefully, disputed the debate on national origins and decried the creation of the new government ministry as an “aberration.”67 The very idea of national identity, and of the nation, he says, is a false and outdated one, “something having only to do with passports or, in other words, and we see this all too clearly, as a police matter.”68 Charles de Gaulle might have had a certain idea of France in mind (“une certaine idée de la France”) when he wrote his memoirs, but, for Bailly, there is no such thing as a “certain idea” (“une idée certaine”) of France. Which is to say that French identity is a slippery conceit at best. Especially when one considers, as Bailly does, places like Culoz, a little town in the foothills of the Alps an hour west of Annecy that, somewhat unexpectedly, is home to a large Muslim population. Or Tarascon and Beaucaire, two towns that straddle the Rhône River between Avignon and Arles, but which are also home to a diverse populace, and which prompt Bailly to reflect on the possibility of a new way of thinking “based on multiplicity and fearful of the tropes and myths deployed by proponents of the singular.”69 As Bailly notes, places like these are legion, in cities and towns, and locales in between, across the country. Collectively, they testify to the many different threads that compose the “complex and tangled ball of yarn”70 that France has become, a country that he describes as intensely varied, multicolored, and diverse, whose future lies in being open to experimentation and evolution, to new threads, new pathways, new folds. Indeed, openness 66 Depardon, La France (2010), n.pag. Despite his resistance to a fixed notion of what France is and how its territory looks, Depardon’s vision tends to elide overt references to the array of cultures present in many of the places he photographs, even in the most provincial of villages. As Jehane Zouyene points out, while bakeries and butcher shops abound in La France, “there is not a single kebab house and only one Chinese restaurant […] This clearly does not seem representative of the diversity one could find in French peri-urban towns circa 2010.” Zouyene, “‘C’était en somme la France’: Photographic Books and Narratives of Post-War France” (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 2021), 235. 67 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 10. 68 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 387. 69 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 279. 70 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 20.

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and acceptance are two ideas paramount to Bailly’s mission. In this way, the title of his book, Le Dépaysement, can be understood as a kind of “déniaisement,”71 or a wake-up call of sorts designed to invite readers to think of France not as some coherent, unified whole, but as a “federation of disparities.”72 As Bailly writes in an especially powerful passage: The enemy I am targeting here is identity, brandished as a state that, under certain conditions, one might have the good fortune to attain. There is no, there cannot be—let’s say it once and for all—a fixed and bounded French identity. There is, in France, like everywhere, a movement toward multiple identities whose coherence is no longer defined by a strict convergence, as might have been the case at certain points in the past. Which is to say that this coherence is still a work in progress, and that implies openness and not closure, receptivity and not exclusion.73

One wonders how conservative critics like Renaud Camus, who was then writing of France’s slow demise, of its gradual “deculturation” and “decivilization,” would respond to such a claim.74 Or Alain Finkielkraut, who, in his essay L’identité malheureuse, published in 2013, rues the public’s generalized dismissal of the notion of a common identity, a notion that he defends as worthwhile and necessary for the continued relevance of France in a globalized world.75 Or, perhaps even more importantly given his notoriety, one might ask how Richard Millet would read Bailly and regard Depardon. I imagine Millet, an important novelist and a fine writer, wandering the streets of Culoz just as Bailly did. Would he feel alone and alienated by the scene, threatened by the impression that he was the only “French” person around for miles, in the same way that he feels isolated, like a stranger in a strange land, when riding the RER through Paris? The reference here is to a comment 71 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 476. 72 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 19. As Michel Lussault writes, “this is where Jean-Christophe Bailly’s book truly comes into its own. In its refusal to subscribe to allegorical discussions about origins, about French identity and officially consecrated notions of cultural heritage, it deconstructs much of the popular opinion emanating from nationalist militants today.” Lussault, “La France dans tous les sens,” n.pag. 73 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 389. 74 See Renaud Camus, Décivilisation (Paris: Fayard, 2011) and La grande déculturation (Paris: Fayard, 2008). 75 Alain Finkielkraut, L’identité malheureuse (Paris: Stock, 2013), 82–3.

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Millet made in 2012 on a nationally televised talk show when he said that being in the Châtelet-Les Halles train station in central Paris during the evening rush hour had become for him an “absolute nightmare, especially when I am the only white person […] I feel a certain sadness when I am compelled to ask myself what country I am in, ethnically, racially, religiously, etc.”76 Haunted by the question of French national identity, and of what he perceives as the decline of France, Millet went on to confirm a longstanding obsession with what critic Pierre Jourde sarcastically called “the invasion of France by a horde of African savages.”77 Indeed, Millet has railed publicly against the kind of changes that Depardon and Bailly, in their shared wisdom and sensibility, have accepted and presented in their work as inevitable and even agreeable. In his writing and public commentary, Millet bemoans the decadence of a certain set of values he holds dear, not simply because authors do not write like they used to—Millet is France’s most outspoken proponent of what he calls “the beautiful French language”—but because he no longer recognizes himself in a nation marked by waning geopolitical influence and demographic change. What is being ruined, he wrote in 2011, is the “meaning of the nation and of my identity as a Frenchman in the face of extra-European immigration that contests it as a value and which does nothing but destroy it.”78 Which is to say that, for him, democracy is being threatened, France is doomed to become an insignificant world power, and everything that has made Richard Millet who he is, his reality, is slowly melting away. For Millet, the grandeur of France, his very own “idea” of France, is dwindling. Perhaps Millet and others like him could learn something from Le Dépaysement, or from Depardon’s pictures. Not least the benefits of an equitable way of looking at the world and a liberal approach to progress, one that regards change, even if it may seem threatening, as completely natural. “France is on the move,” as Depardon reminds us.79 Le Dépaysement and La France do not mourn this movement, nor do 76 Richard Millet, “Je ne supporte plus les mosquées en France,” Ce soir ou jamais, France 3, February 7, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJ21q13wPk. 77 Pierre Jourde, “Pourquoi je n’aurai pas signé le texte d’Annie Ernaux,” September 14, 2012, http://pierre-jourde.blogs.nouvelobs.com/richard-millet/ (site discontinued). 78 Richard Millet, Fatigue du sens (Paris: Éditions Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2011), 10. 79 Depardon, La France (2012), 21.

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they entirely exult in it. What they do is accept it as a necessary and potentially favorable state of affairs, arguing for a fluid new approach, indeed a recalibration “of the national,” as Bailly writes, “in light of new arrivals and new desires, and not a yearning for the past.”80 In a word, they embrace it. As both Bailly’s and Depardon’s approach to French places seems to suggest, the experience of subtle differences, of change, of feeling somewhat unfamiliar, out of place, and disoriented at home—as Finkielkraut writes in a more elegiac tone, “we do not feel at home anymore”81—is precisely what might allow the inhabitants of France to brace themselves against a hazardous universalizing tendency toward national identification and to cultivate instead a more complete and fulfilling sense, perhaps not of national belonging, but rather of solidarity.

80 Bailly, Le Dépaysement, 280. 81 Finkielkraut, L’identité malheureuse, 82.

Coda On the Ruins of Empire Coda Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. —Robert Macfarlane1 One must think of France as discontinuous. —François Garde2

Thomas Jorion is a young French photographer with a passion for ruins. Not unlike a cohort of other artists from the same generation who share an affinity for infiltrating decaying places (a practice that is not only furtive and risky, but often illegal),3 Jorion’s fascination for disused industrial sites and bedraggled remnants of the built environment has taken him to diverse locales around the globe. Take, for example, his remarkable series of images from the bowels of derelict buildings in Detroit (in a series he called L’autre Amérique), or a more melancholic 1 Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: Norton, 2019), 230. 2 François Garde, Marcher à Kerguelen (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), 157. Garde’s book chronicles an expedition the author made to cross the main island of the Kerguelen Archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean. Considered to be among the most forlorn places on the planet, Kerguelen is a French territory. As Garde notes, “From a certain point of view, which is my own, France starts in Kerguelen and ends in Dunkirk, and vice versa” (157). 3 One thinks here, for example, of Jorion’s compatriots Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

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constellation of photographs of forsaken theaters that dot the Italian countryside (Veduta).4 His work in Eastern Europe draws out the unearthly quality of obsolete military sites (Silencio). Jorion has also made pictures closer to his home in Paris. His series on the petite ceinture, what he calls “the forgotten line,” resuscitates the remains of a fossilized nineteenth-century railway line that circles the city just inside the ring road and which, despite all appearances to the contrary, is in fact a thriving and biodiverse ecosystem unto itself.5 In contrast to the more forward-looking building sites photographed by Marc Petitjean and Stéphane Couturier that I discuss in an earlier chapter, all of Jorion’s work testifies to the aesthetic potential of atrophied structures become wastelands, what the French call the friche. And his art subscribes to photography’s capacity to mitigate the gradual abrasion of these sites over time. But another project serves as an even more useful counterpoint, and coda, to the photographs and photographic series of French landscapes surveyed in this book, since it intentionally attends to places like these located outside the Hexagon that, in many ways, have remained tethered, historically and geopolitically, to the metropole. In this series entitled Vestiges d’empire, Jorion’s photography makes visible the architectural and infrastructural residue of France’s imperial aspirations around the globe. The topographic state of place that Jorion’s series establishes invites us to think differently about many of the images discussed earlier in this book, since it problematizes what we mean when we talk about “French” landscapes. Not only does Jorion’s appraisal of these sites suggest how the myriad ruins of France’s transoceanic legacy elicit a spatially orchestrated form of trauma that continues to exert its force in the present, the attention they pay to deceptively humdrum postcolonial places posits the notion of the territoire national as both a psychically loaded and limiting concept. From 2013 to 2016, Thomas Jorion traveled to cities and towns in continental Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as to island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, seeking out sites haunted by visible traces of empire. Vast in scope, the project yielded over 150 images taken in 12 countries, from former colonies like Algeria, Senegal, and 4 Along with the numerous photobooks that Jorion has published, interested readers can also consult a sampling of his work at http://www.thomasjorion.com. 5 Jorion is one among several French artists who have explored the recesses of the petite ceinture. See, for example, the work of Anthony Hamboussi and Jean-Philippe Corre.

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Vietnam to a portion of the erstwhile French protectorate in Louisiana, the French concession in Shanghai, and Chandernagor, a former French trading post established in 1696 in India’s West Bengal State. While far from an exhaustive look at places marked by France’s colonial history— countries like Mali, Mayotte, Ivory Coast, and Tunisia, to name a few, are not represented here—the series nevertheless provides a robust survey of the vast geographical extent of the French empire’s reach from its beginnings in the seventeenth century through the 1960s. It does so by homing in on the diverse ways colonialization and imperial control manifest in the constructed environment: from buildings designed to accommodate the colonial bureaucracy and private residences where former administrators lived (like utilitarian apartment complexes, opulent seaside villas, and palace hotels), to military batteries, forts, monuments, cemeteries, mills, factories, schools, rural churches and urban cathedrals, courts, commissariats, and train stations. Working exclusively with a large-format view camera, the images that compose this series, many of which have been exhibited in galleries and art fairs across Europe and Asia, and which are gathered in a weighty photobook published in 2016,6 bring to light, in often luminous ways, the photogenic potential of structures in various stages of decay. From streetscapes and carefully framed frontal shots of vernacular architecture, to interiors (one notes a predilection for staircases and long hallways) and other images that pull back and give viewers a wider view of the landscape, the photographs signal a historical rupture by which sites built and used by the French foreign presence have lost their initial reason for being. Some have succumbed to the inevitable process of entropy. Though architecture strives to be permanent, it will slowly decompose and fall into disrepair if left unattended. Others, including some more well-preserved sites, have been requisitioned by cultures and formerly subjugated peoples who ascribe new meaning and functionality to them. Many of the images oscillate between two distinct temporalities. Not unlike an optical illusion by which a slight change of perspective allows viewers to see two images in one, some of Jorion’s photographs elicit a historically fluid form of cognitive dissonance that encourages us to shift back and forth between epochs, pivoting between the colonial past and the postcolonial now. While Jorion’s practice is clearly indebted to photographic projects like the New Topographics and the Mission photographique de la DATAR 6 Thomas Jorion, Vestiges d’empire (Paris: La Martinière, 2016).

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that inform much of the work discussed in these pages, it proves equally grounded in a long tradition of voyeuristic “ruin gazing”7 that can be traced back to artists like Giovanni Piranesi, Caspar David Friedrich, and Gustave Flaubert, among others. It also resonates with the preservationist impulse of the Mission héliographique from 1851, which sought to create an archival trace of structures that, at the time, “were close to ruin and in need of urgent repair.”8 The photograph of the seaside Church of the Sacred Heart in Vietnam’s Red River Delta, for example, an image that closes the published volume, seemingly embodies all of these historical precedents (Figure 6.1). The picture’s melancholic vision is mitigated by the presence of ordinary objects like the two mopeds, power lines, and the thick layer of paper, plastic, and aluminum trash that has washed up on the rocky coast, grounding this place in the gritty reality of the everyday and the plight of the environment. Seen from a distance, the cathedral seems to stand proudly erect looking out, almost longingly, toward the misty sea and a sky full of wispy gray clouds, an effect of its composition that also evokes the Romantic pathos of an endangered architectural wonder left to rot. Considered collectively, the pictures that compose Vestiges d’empire are emblematic of a practice that scholar David Campany calls “late photography,” which he describes as a “turn toward photographing the aftermath of events—traces, fragments, empty buildings, empty streets, damage to the body and damage to the world.”9 However, unlike Joel Meyerowitz’s series of photographs made at Gound Zero in Lower Manhattan in the days and weeks immediately following 9/11, a series of images fittingly entitled Aftermath that, for Campany, typifies this phenomenon, Jorion’s pictures are nothing if not too late, arriving more than a half a century after the wave of independence movements 7 For a survey of the history of ruin gazing in western culture, see Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, “Introduction,” in Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–4. 8 From an article that appears in the June 29, 1851 issue of La Lumière. Quoted in de Mondenard, La Mission héliographique (2002), 48. 9 David Campany, “Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on the Problems of ‘Late Photography’,” Photoworks/Photoforum, 2003. https://davidcampany.com/ safety-in-numbness/. For Campany, “late” photography “turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened totting up the effects of the world’s activity. This is a kind of photograph that foregoes the representation of events in progress and so cedes them to other media. As a result, it is quite different from the spontaneous snapshot and has a different relation to memory and to history.”

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during the 1950s and 1960s that ended the French empire. Despite this lapse in time, or perhaps because of it, Vestiges d’empire constitutes a potent reflection on the long-term consequences of colonialism. Not only do these images illustrate what these sites have become since decolonization, the architectonic leftovers that they document serve as vehicles for the persistence of colonial memory, and as reminders of the political violence that marked the period. Despite the decades that have passed since the fall of the French empire, the idea of the “aftermath” seems particularly apropos, especially when we consider that the term was initially used to refer to what remains in the fields after a harvest (math is Old English for mowing). A number of Jorion’s photographs are especially resonant with the legacy of colonialism’s reaping of resources, and with the decimation of cultures, traditions, and peoples as a byproduct of that process. Look, for example, at the series of photographs of disaffected distilleries and sugar refineries in Guadeloupe (Figure 6.2). Founded by French settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the factories built in Lamentin, Sainte-Rose, and on the island of Marie-Galante displaced small farms and made way for the large-scale industrialization of rum and molasses. Jorion’s pictures recall the legacy of sugar production in Guadeloupe that relied on slave labor for much of its history. But they are also haunted by the series of strikes—some of which were violently repressed, like the infamous massacre of Saint-Valentin in 1952—by workers fighting for better conditions. The images invite us to imagine the unrelenting heat from the boilers and the ferocity of the grinders used to process the cane as apt metaphors for the more large-scale “processing” and exploitation of Caribbean resources, both material and human, that the sugar trade has historically embodied. In French, the term exploitation refers at once to a business concern designed to make profit, which often takes the form of a farm (as in une exploitation agricole), and to the all-too-common kind of illicit and unfair practices that abuse labor and decimate natural resources. Over time, however, vegetation has taken over here, the greenery benefiting from the humidity, the sun, and the lack of human intervention to infiltrate, envelop, and stain the deep ocher hues of oxidized metal, colonizing these spaces and making them productive, in a different sense, once again. While the photographs thereby suggest nature’s propensity for resurgence, or the supposition that time heals all wounds, the unmistakable presence of the machines, as stalwart as they are sculptural, serves as a reminder of the centuries of injustice that occurred here.

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Forensic in their detail, like police photographs taken at the scene of a crime that, as some postcolonial scholars would argue, remains “not so much unsolved as unresolved,”10 throughout the series Jorion’s pictures identify certain sites as visible scars on the landscape. Even more notable in this regard are images that bear witness to what we might call, following Ann Laura Stoler, the “carceral archipelago of empire.”11 Photographs of prison complexes figure prominently in Vestiges d’empire (Figure 6.3). Like the dilapidated scraps of the sugar cane industry, the bagne at Petit Canal, which was used to detain slaves (and not to incarcerate hardened criminals), is also in Guadeloupe, signaling how the exploitation of natural resources there depended on forced labor. Perusers of Jorion’s photobook will also note the penal colony of Cayenne, known as Devil’s Island, in Guiana’s Salvation Islands, off the northeastern coast of South America. Established in 1852 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, this institution was used primarily to house political dissidents. Among the most notable bagnards was Alfred Dreyfus, whose stay from 1895 to 1899 makes this colony a site where the traumas of colonialism and anti-Semitism converge. Many convicts in this and similar penal colonies in the two neighboring islands (l’Île Royale and l’Île Saint-Joseph) were held in solitary confinement. The conditions in these places, commonly referred to as a “green hell” and a “dry guillotine,” were notoriously difficult.12 The death rate has been estimated at 75 percent. As we can clearly see in Jorion’s enjungled views, since the prisons were shuttered in the 1950s, here too nature has spontaneously regained the upper hand. As Siobhan Lyons writes, images of such overgrowth serve as potent reminders of an inevitable future, “whereby humanity’s influence is bested, removed, and rendered obsolete in favor of organic, botanical life not beholden to human history or culture.”13 In these pictures, a rhizomatic network of roots, 10 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Haunted Landscapes,” in Landscape and Emotion: The Reappearance of Emotional Geographies, ed. Toni Luna and Isabel Valverde (Barcelona: Landscape Observatory of Catalonia, Pompeu Fabra University, 2015), 26. 11 See Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23:2 (2008), 203. 12 See Charles Forsdick, “Postcolonizing the Bagne,” French Studies 72:2 (April 2018), 237–55. 13 Siobhan Lyons, “Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the Anthropocene,” in Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3.

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trunks, and branches overwhelm the cells and hallways of the deserted bagne from above and below. That the trees have imposed themselves so mightily on this nefarious ground reminds us of two things: that they have always been here, silent witnesses to history, and that they always will be, ultimately outliving us all.14 Whether shot inside or out, with an explicit human (or animal) presence or (more commonly) void, dark or illuminated, all of the pictures here present us with places haunted by a past that never really passes, to borrow a phrase made popular by scholars of the Nazi Occupation in France but which applies more universally to a variety of collective traumas that are almost impossible to forget or repress.15 The photographs of Vestiges d’empire thus embody photography’s status “as a kind of medium” that conjures “the spectral presence of its absent subjects,”16 those colonial ghosts that haunt these defunct places. For T.J. Demos, this kind of photographic “spectropoetics” attunes us to “beings and presences” that “enter uneasily into, or insistently disturb, representation and the stability of its visual, temporal, and spatial logic.”17 Jorion reflects these thoughts in his own artist’s statement when he notes that “we inherit a history made visible in ruins that evoke the vanity of supremacist peoples, and whose invisible aspects continue to haunt the many crises of modernity.”18 Though the images appear detached and noncommittal, this neutrality belies an inherent tension that pits a fascination for what these spaces have become against a

14 In his photographs of the bagne, Jorion seems to respond directly to Patrick Chamoiseau’s call for visual artists to reveal the “Traces-Mémoires” of colonial incarceration in the tropics. See Andy Stafford’s suggestive discussion of Chamoiseau, and of Chamoiseau’s collaborative photo-text on the bagne, in the chapter “Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi in the Penal Colony: Photo-text and Memory-traces,” in Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 140–55. 15 See, for example, Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994). 16 Lisa Saltzman, “What Remains: Photography and Landscape, Memory, and Oblivion,” in Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, Performance, ed. Nat Trotman and Jennifer Blessing (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2010), 129. 17 T.J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 9. 18 Jorion, Vestiges d’empire, n.pag.

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recognition of the brutal history that has marked and continues to stalk them. While Jorion’s photographs may at first enchant viewers, the aftermath of empire they bring to light almost always ignites what Stoler calls an “aftershock” that invites us to resist the “melancholic gaze to reposition the present in the wider structures of vulnerability and refusal that imperial formations sustain.”19 Ruins are hardly inert. They actively continue to exert themselves. Which perhaps helps to explain why some of these sites have begun to attract a small but devoted cohort of “rubble seeking” travelers who, even if earnest in their endeavor and innocent in their intentions, nevertheless participate in a kind of “dark tourism,” making what are often covert visits to sites that have been neither commercialized nor consecrated officially as historical heritage.20 Jorion, himself, is certainly conscious of this ethical quandary. His images, in the striking and sometimes voyeuristic way they aestheticize sites marked by pain and suffering, seem to acknowledge the tension that his practice elicits. They make art of sites that, many would argue, need to be seen, but which, rotten from the inside, continue to ruin the present. Perhaps more subtly, while Jorion’s topographic imaginary brings the ruins of the past to bear on the collective conscience of postcolonial France, they also remind us that the history of photography is intimately linked to the history of colonialism itself. As Donna Brett notes, photography and ruins are similar in a few important ways. Most notably, they are both bound by “a mutual temporality that is subject to remembering and forgetting, and yet each bear traces of what has come before.”21 Scanning through Vestiges d’empire, keen viewers will notice that many of the images evoke this connection by positing ruined space, quite literally, as a kind of photographic apparatus. 19 Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 194. 20 “Rubble seeking” is Stoler’s term. See Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 198. For a good summary of the history and definition of the term “dark tourism,” and a discussion of its evolution into a dynamic field of interdisciplinary study, see Wendy Asquith and Charles Forsdick, “Dark Tourism: The Emergence of a Field,” Memories at Stake/Mémoires en jeu. Revue transdisciplinaire de l’association “Mémoire des signes” 3 (2017), 46–54. 21 Donna West Brett, Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 18. On the connections linking the history of photography and the history of colonialism, also see David Bate, “Photography and the Colonial Vision,” Third Text 7:22 (1993), 81–91.

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Long corridors guide our line of sight toward doorways, holes poked in walls, and windows that both frame the outside world and serve as apertures that let light into dimly lit chambers (Figure 6.4). If Jorion’s practice thus acknowledges how photography and ruins both serve as technologies of memory, thanks in part to their shared indexical ontology, it also implicitly alludes to the ways photography has been used since its inception as an “optical technology of empire.”22 One thinks here of some of the finest examples of nineteenth-century travel photography. As scholars have shown, Maxime Du Camp’s work in Egypt, Syria, and Namibia, Francis Frith’s pictures of Palestine, or Samuel Bourne’s Indian photographs, for example, are not simply artifacts from exotic places designed to excite and entice European audiences. They should also be understood as a “technology of the colonial state”23 that, as Ali Behdad argues, turned Europe’s Orientalist vision of these foreign lands “into images received as objective fact.”24 Similarly, Gerry Badger reminds us that photography was developed in the 1840s by the two great colonial powers of the time, Great Britain and France, and could be said to be an important accessory in the implementation of the colonialist enterprise. So much early photography is in the “travelers in ancient lands” mode, its aim to survey topographies, cultures, societies, and in a symbolic as well as a practical sense, to “possess” them […] After Sontag and others in the 1970s criticized the tendency for photographers to aggressively “colonize” and “appropriate” others’ realities, the more thoughtful members of the profession have become circumspect in how, as travelers, they depict a society that is not their own.25

Jorion’s practice is clearly sensitive to the power of art, and of landscape photography in particular, to “signify possession, mastery, and sovereignty.”26 But treading lightly while traveling, making photographs 22 Giblett, “Preface,” 16. 23 Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1. 24 Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1. 25 Gerry Badger, “The Physiognomy of a Nation: Anatomy of a Photographic Project,” in Mark Power, The Sound of Two Songs (Brighton: Photoworks, 2010), n.pag. 26 Solomon-Godeau, “Haunted Landscapes,” 24. As Rod Giblett notes, similarly, “The colonial enterprise, settler societies, and landscape photography are mutually reinforcing.” Giblett, “Preface,” 16.

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with a large-format view camera mounted on a tall tripod, all while wearing a professional backpack loaded with gear, is an imposing and conspicuous activity, especially for a white Frenchman who happens to be very tall (6’4”). To wit: twice while photographing in Casablanca, police intervened, confiscated his equipment, and questioned him about his interest in what they considered to be completely banal and altogether defunct sites (in one instance Jorion was making pictures inside a slaughterhouse). Concerned that the photographs could tarnish the kingdom’s increasingly glossy brand, the response by local authorities also suggests their continued distrust of the medium’s capacity to allow Europeans the opportunity to “metonymically possess ‘the Orient’.”27 What these officers failed to recognize, however, was that Jorion’s photographs, hardly nostalgic exultations of a lost era, can be read as a self-conscious send-up of nineteenth-century European photography’s obsessive Orientalizing vision of places that, even more so at the time, were rife with ruins from a bygone era.28 They also represent a critique of the colonial project itself. For, as one critic put it, they remind viewers that the French empire was built on “a mortifying pile of accumulated riches and on a constant and cynical urge to exploit resources and local populations.”29 Jorion’s exploration of these seemingly insignificant sites, rundown detritus of the past scattered across the globe, brings to light the sheer vanity of imperial conquest and control in postcolonial places that armchair travelers, and most French people, will never have the opportunity to see. Perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, Vestiges d’empire seems to respond directly to the major exhibit of topographic photography that I mention in the Introduction to this book. This show, entitled Paysages français, or French Landscapes, was mounted at the French National Library in 2017 and 2018 and allowed viewers to contemplate 27 Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 5. The police who stopped Jorion on those two occasions can also be seen to instantiate a form of resistance to what scholars have called the often exploitative and trivializing nature of “ruin porn” photography. For more on the ambiguous and often problematic dynamics of the genre, which, as I suggest in my reading above, Jorion’s work recognizes and ultimately counteracts, see Lyons, “Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the Anthropocene.” 28 Behdad notes that many photographic expeditions in the nineteenth century focused on antiquities, archaeological sites, biblical landscapes, and monuments in various states of decay. Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 3–4. 29 François Chazal, “Preface,” in Thomas Jorion, Vestiges d’empire (Paris: La Martinière, 2016), n.pag.

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hundreds of photographs of places in what the show’s curators likened to a “photographic journey though the French territoire” that began in the 1980s and has continued ever since.30 Given that virtually all of the almost 1,000 images included in the exhibition, made by over 150 different artists, represented sites from around mainland France— only a handful of photographs did not—I would like to suggest that Thomas Jorion’s project works counter-discursively to this FrancoFrench understanding of the national territory by positing pictures of the postcolony, collectively, as a blind spot in France’s vision of itself, emblematized as it was by this exhibition. In other words, Jorion’s work complicates what we mean when we (and the curators of the BNF show, like the organizers of the DATAR mission before them) talk about “French” landscapes. After all, aren’t the disaffected sites in Jorion’s series, and not simply those located in overseas départements and territories, in many ways still “French” places too? French places not in a geopolitical sense, nor in a postcolonial sense, nor even in what some might refer to as a revisionary post-postcolonial sense, since many of these places won their independence from France long ago. But “French” perhaps in what Oana Panaïté calls a “paracolonial” sense, marked as all of these sites are by what she refers to as the “residue or discrete permanence” of imperial France’s former presence.31 I cannot help thinking here of Jorion’s series as a way to track what we might call the “paranormal” activity of all of those “paracolonial” phantasms, those ghosts of the French empire, that continue to haunt the places his images visit. Seen in this way, Vestiges d’empire not only hints at how myopic it has become to associate France solely with the metropole, it also participates in a larger movement to “globalize” our understanding of France and French culture championed by scholars like Panaïté but also, more broadly, by Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman in the United States and by Patrick Boucheron in France. Their books, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History and Histoire mondiale de la France, respectively, consider the idea of the nation, and of national identity and collective memory, as a construct that is much less delimited than we 30 Raphaële Bertho and Héloïse Conésa, “Nous verrons un autre monde,” in Paysages français. Une aventure photographique, 1984–2017 (Paris: BNF Éditions, 2017), 11. 31 See Oana Panaïté, The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 4.

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may think.32 For the idea of France, and its history, is discontinuous and perennially intertwined with a diverse array of geographies, cultures, and histories that span the globe. As historian Stéphane Gerson writes, echoing writer François Garde’s thoughts that I cite in the epigraph to this chapter, we need, now more than ever, a “decentered” approach to France, one that acknowledges the permeability of the nation’s borders, both geographic and cultural, and “moves between the city and the region, the nation and the continent, or rather the various nations and continents of our planet.” Jorion’s work in Vestiges d’empire demonstrates how the ruins of empire, and the haunting presences that reverberate through them, can be harnessed to decenter the notion of the paysage français and, in doing so, remind viewers that France, French memory, its history, its civilization and the places that have been marked by it have always and will forever inform and be informed by transnational phenomena that are “embedded,” as Gerson puts it, “within networks, connections, [and] interdependencies that range far and wide.”33 If Thomas Jorion’s photographs remind viewers of France’s global reach during the colonial period, and of the enduring presence of these colonial traces in the transnational “francosphère,”34 they also imply, not unlike the work of Panaïté, Suleiman, McDonald, and Boucheron, that the network of influence flows both ways, that contemporary French culture is equally conditioned by and bears traces of the impact of Global France, and indeed by the rest of the globe. Seen from this vantage point, most if not all of the photographs that I discuss in this book’s earlier chapters acknowledge, some more explicitly than others, the kind of decentered and porous relationship that France entertains with the world outside its frontiers. Not only do the photographers at 32 See Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, eds, French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Patrick Boucheron, ed., Histoire mondiale de la France (Paris: Seuil, 2017). 33 Stéphane Gerson, “Preface to the English-Language Edition,” in France in the World: A New Global History, ed. Patrick Boucheron (New York: Other Press, 2019), xxiii. 34 Wary of the notion of the “francophone world,” scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of the “francosphère” to describe the many ways French language and culture cross borders and evade defined frontiers. See, for example, the journal Francosphères and Claire Launchberry and Megan C. MacDonald, eds, Urban Bridges and Global Capitals: Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).

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the heart of The Topographic Imaginary travel extensively to make pictures around the world, much of their work inside the Hexagon is informed by these experiences. I think most readily here, for example, of the way Thibaut Cuisset highlights the horizon line in his photographs of the French countryside in much the same way that he does in pictures that depict seemingly infinite expanses of space in Iceland or Namibia. The work by many of the photographers studied here also reflects the transnational flow of people, goods, and ideas, and is often imbued with the impact of elsewhere. As we have seen, Béatrix von Conta’s work on the flux of the global supply chain or Julien Chapsal’s consideration of spaces vacated by migrants near the Calais jungle, think through this paradigm quite expressly. Others do so perhaps less intentionally, but no less forcefully. I am thinking here of the way Stéphane Couturier’s pictures make visible the way workers, many of them undoubtedly foreign, help build a brick-and-mortar presence in Paris for the behemoths of global capital and banking. Thierry Girard’s iteration of a different brand of spectral photographs from rural France often considers a long history of international conquest, political meddling, and the echoes of foreign wars that reverberate throughout French places off the beaten path. One gets the sense looking at Raymond Depardon’s series, La France, that certain sites in France’s peri-urban zones or slowly depopulating villages might contend with the push-and-pull of global commerce and the demands of neoliberal capitalism and strive, through it all, to retain a sense of self, and of place. Pictures of France’s urban periphery, especially images of social housing built during the immediate post-war years to lodge, in part, a significant portion of the immigrant labor force, remind viewers that these places are linked to a long history of colonial aggression, postcolonial discrimination, and what Mathieu Rigouste calls “endocolonial segregation.”35 The cité could even be considered a “colonized” space unto itself.36 In this respect, could we not consider photographs of the 35 In his work on policing the banlieue, sociologist Mathieu Rigouste has argued that the state’s deliberate “banishing” of workers from the colonies into isolated cités in the suburbs around major French cities amounts to a kind of “endocolonial segregation” by which imperial forms of domination are systematically applied to marginalized communities living inside the national territory. See Rigouste, La Domination policière, 20. 36 See Didier Lapeyronnie, “La Banlieue comme théâtre colonial, ou la fracture coloniale dans les quartiers,” in La Fracture coloniale, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 218. Both Laila

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built environment in the banlieue, some of it in a sad state of disrepair and neglect, as a representation of the ruins, and the decadence, of empire manifest in the metropole? Given the various zones of contact between metropolitan France and the world beyond its borders, I would like to suggest in conclusion that topographic photography illustrates more generally how paying attention to places that are close to home, as these photographers do so compellingly in much of their work, is a logical response to the disorienting forces of our ever “flattening” globe.37 As scholars have argued, our culture has become increasingly delocalized as a result of our unprecedented hyperconnectivity. Ursula Heise, for example, maintains that we are often no longer “anchored in place.”38 The effect of this kind of dislocation is a transformative change in our daily encounters to the point that our lives have been “lifted off” their connection with locality.39 We are more and more “unplaced,” as Tim Dee says, “even when we live somewhere that we can call home, we spend much of our time away.”40 As I have tried to suggest throughout this book, the topographic turn in contemporary French photography is part of a larger gesture to reorient French culture toward its more immediate surroundings. In turn, looking at these pictures, and others like them, encourages viewers to attend more earnestly to the places in which they dwell. These works of art beckon us to pause, get our bearings, and seriously notice our environs, regardless of where we live, so that we may acknowledge with a heightened sense of clarity, insight, and care what it means for us to be right where we are.

Amine and Stève Puig make similar arguments in their respective studies of the perpetuation of a postcolonial dynamic in post-war writing of the Parisian banlieue. See Amine, Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018); and Puig, Littérature urbaine et mémoire postcoloniale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2019). 37 I borrow the term from journalist Thomas Friedman in his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). 38 Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 10. 39 John Tomlinson, qtd. in Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 52. 40 Tim Dee, “Introduction,” in Ground Work: Writings on People and Places (London: Vintage, 2018), 2–3.

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Index Index

abstraction 49 Académie d’Architecture 88 Acconci, Vito 44 advertisements 70 aesthetic autonomy 58 aesthetic potential, civil engineering 50 aesthetics 139–40 agency 12, 107, 119 AIG French Property 53 Algerian war 127 Amat, Guillaume 104 aménagement du territoire 21–2 anarchitectural practice 44 Anthropocene, the 106 archaeology 80, 120, 124 Ardennes 120–1 Arles, photography festival 26n67 art, power of 115–16, 179–80 art photography 51 artificial catastrophe 80 artist statements 104–5, 177 artistic pretensions 46 Atget, Eugène 18, 19 attention, disintegration of 8 attentional prosthesis 9 Au Rendez-vous des Routiers, Paris 55, 56 Auerbacher, Dominique 110 Augé, Marc 16n39, 41 auteurs 118 authenticity, loss of 8 Azoulay, Ariella 107

Bacqué, Dominique 25 Badger, Gerry 118, 179 Bailly, Jean-Christophe 40, 45, 64n14, 65, 81, 86, 102, 103, 136–7, 138 Le Dépaysement. Voyages en France 158–69 Bains de Dieppe 156–7 Baldus, Edouard 35 Baltard, Victor 38 banality 143 Baudrillard, Jean 40 Bauman, Zygmunt 108n37 Becher, Bernd and Hilla 89 Behdad, Ali 179 Benjamin, Walter 41–2, 44, 60 Bennett, Jane 12 Bivar, Venus 21n53 Blanc, Emmanuelle 7 Cartographie d’une extrême occupation humaine series 105–6, 109 Bordeaux 35n8 Boucheron, Patrick 181, 182 boulevard Morland, Paris 59 boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris 47–8 boulevards des maréchaux, Paris 74 Bourne, Samuel 179 Brett, Donna 178 Brexit 108 Brézillon, Jérôme 102–3 Bright, Deborah 164 Brittany 104

206



Brogdon, Jim 16n39 broken territories 121 Bruère-Allichamps 62 Bruno, G. 27 Bustamante, Jean-Marc 48 Calais jungle 106–8, 110, 183 cameras 2–3, 10-11, 14–15, 17, 45, 47, 89, 100n18, 123, 129, 145, 153, 173 Campany, David 174–5 Camus, Renaud 167 capitalism 51–4 Carpenter, Juliet 65 Carré-Matei, Jean-Philippe 104 cars 70 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 6, 25 Cartographie d’une extrême occupation humaine series (Blanc) 105–6, 109 Cartwright, Lisa 12–13 Casablanca 180 Casey, Edward 139 Cayenne 176–7 Cendrars, Blaise 91 Centre Pompidou, Paris 37–45, 54–7 C’était Paris en 1970 94 Chabanais 123–4, 125 Chaillou, Michel 14 Chamoiseau, Patrick 177n14 Channel Tunnel 93 chantier, the 36, 43, 47, 50, 54 Chapsal, Julien 106–8, 109–10, 183 Châtelet-Les Halles, Paris 168 Cheval, François 85 Chevrier, Claire 87 Chevrier, Jean-François 18–19, 19, 27, 48–9, 132, 152 cities, life cycles 33–5 civic duty 107–8 civil engineering, aesthetic potential 50 Clermont-Ferrand 135 Cole, Teju 65 Collot, Michel 136 Colmar 161n53 colonial history 171–82

colonialism 175 Comment, Bernard 102, 113–14 commonplace, the 8 composition 133 Comptoir National d’escompte de Paris 52 conceptual disorientation 48 conceptual practice 46 Conley, Tom 123–4n33 construction materials 48 construction projects, Centre Pompidou 37–45 cool appraisal 5 Cornu, Marcel 79 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 133 Corsica 104 Costa, Fabienne 95 Couturier, Stéphane 7, 75, 172, 183 conceptual disorientation 48 practice 46-7 reputation 46 Urban Archaeology series 29, 46–54, 58–60 use of tableau form 48-9 Crawford, Mathew 8 creative destruction 34, 42, 54 Crédit Lyonnais bank, Paris 52–3, 58–9 Crépu, Michel 131 Cresswell, Tim 6n13 Cronin, Michael 116, 137 Cuisset, Thibaut 7, 24n62, 30, 115–16, 129–41, 183 aesthetics 139–40 campagnes photographiques 31 composition 133, 134 Le Pays clair 135–6 minimalist approach 131 photobooks 129–30 practice 130–1, 133–40 process 116 style 135–6 Une campagne photographique series 133–5, 138–9 visual magic 132

Index cultural distraction 8 Cuvelier, Eugène 18 Dagonet, François 22 Dalla Santa, Gérard 99–100, 101 dark tourism 178 DATAR 21, 21–6, 94, 103, 112 de Boismenu, Geoffroy 104 de Fareins, Yann 111 de Gaulle, Charles 21, 166 decolonization 21, 175 deculturation 160, 167 Dee, Tim 9, 184 Delangle, Frédéric 102–3 Delouvrier, Paul 64 Delsaux, Cédric 102–3 DeLue, Rachel 6n13 demolition 37–9, 84–6 Demos, T.J. 177 Denis, Monsieur 55, 56 Depardon, Raymond 24n62, 112–13 catalogue 144, 145n3, 165–6 color scheme 152 comparison with Bailly 158–69 contribution 145 criticism 150–4, 159n45 expedition 143–4 funding 144 interest in trees 148–9 Journal de France film) 149 La France de/ Raymond Depardon series 31, 113–14, 143–69, 183 nostalgic potential 150–4 and peripheral France 154–8 as photojournalist 151 political landscapes 164–9 practice 145 project 149–50 vision 152, 153 vision of France 144, 160, 162n56, 166n66 vision of place 146–50 depth of field 15, 47, 123, 135, 163 Devil’s Island 176–7 dialogism 84

207

Dieppe 155 digital formats 46 dislocation 184 disorientation 150, 165 sense of 77 documentary rephotography 95–102 documentary style 37 Doisneau, Robert 91 Dreyfus, Alfred 176 Du Camp, Maxime 179 Durandelle, Louis-Émile 49–50, 51–2, 57 economic devastation 121–2 edgelands 27 Eiffel, Gustave 53 Eiffel Tower 91 embodied experience 139–40 Enlarge Your Paris initiative 88 entropy 173 erasure 84–6 état d’âme 28–9 ethical quandary 178 ethnology of the proximate 110 Étretat 162n55 Evans, Walker 91 evidentiary force 12 Ewing, William 5 excavation 43 exposure times 76, 105 Fallet, Camille 7, 29–30, 149, 155 The Greater Paris Landscape Manual 88–92 familiarity, and unfamiliarity 6–7 Faure, Alain 7–8n17 Fermigier, André 40n21 field of vision 111 filmic hieroglyphs 123–4n33 Finkielkraut, Alain 167, 169 First World War 125–6, 127 Flux series (von Conta) 108–10 FNAC 94 focus 15

208



Fontainebleau 165 forensic aesthetic, the 11 Fougeirol, Benoît 86 framing 49–50 France, geographical center 62 France(s) territoire liquide 94–5, 145 artist statements 104–5 FTL 102–10 intention 103–4 local turn 110–14 mission 113–14 photographers 103 picture styles 103–10 task 102–3 Franco-Prussian war 111–12, 120–1 francosphère, the 182 Frantz, Anaïk 66 Frémont, Armand 150 French desert, the 21 French Revolution 111 Frenchness 162n56 friche, the 172 Friedlander, Lee 117 Frioul islands 105 Frith, Francis 179 Garde, François 182 Garnier Opera House, Paris 35 Gaston, Monsieur 57 gaze 47, 91 geographical turn, the 20n51 geographicity 66 geologic time 105 geo-photographic potential 27 George, Pierre 78n52 German Archive of Reality commission 98, 99 Gerson, Stéphane 30, 94, 111, 182 ghosts 54–60 gilets jaunes 157 Girard, Thierry 30, 97, 102, 115–29, 140–1, 183 approach 3–5 captions 123–4, 125, 127 “De l’esprit des lieux” 128–9

D’une mer l’autre 119–20 Nord-Pas-de-Calais photopraphs 1–6 Paysages insoumis series 30–1, 120, 122–9 photobooks 117–18 photographic walks 117 practice 2, 117, 131 process 116, 118–19 prose 118–19 Salle des fêtes series 120, 120–1 style 123–4, 135 tableaux 119 Une campagne victorieuse series 120, 121–2 vision of place 3 Global France 171–84 Google Street View 100n18 Gowin, Emmet 13 grain silos 89 grands ensembles, Paris 78–86 great events 37 Greater Paris 61–92 banlieues 64, 67, 86–92 the city’s edge 68–72 communes 74 cultural representations 64–8 départements 74 geographicity 66 heterogeneity 90 les grands ensembles 78–86 the périphérique 73–8 population 78n52 total surface area 62 Greenberg, Clement 49 Guadeloupe 175, 176 Guilluy, Christophe 154–5 Gursky, Andreas 51, 53, 57, 157 Gwiazdzinski, Luc 66, 67 Haacke, Hans 51 Hauser, Kitty 120 Hazan, Éric 68 Heise, Ursula 184 Hers, François 22, 24, 25

Index hieroglyphs 123–4 history dialectical conception of 41–2 layers of 163–4 homelessness 56n64 horizon, the 136, 183 Horvath, Christina 65 Houellebecq, Michel 152–4 Hugo, Victor 30, 65 human forms 82, 105, 122n28, 151, 154 Huyghe, Pierre, Light Conical Intersect 45 hygiene 55n61 hyperconnectivity 184 identity 41, 103, 145, 165–9, 181–2 ideological associations 164–9 imperial ruins 171–82 impermanence 102 Implosions series (Pernot) 84–6 inanimate topography 126 infranational territory 30, 94–5 infraordinary, the 161 inhabitants, Paris 55–7 insurgent landscapes 122–9 intention 10 interdependency 148 international frontiers 108, 109–10 intertextual associations 49n44 intimacy, loss of 8 intimate territories 104 invisibility 119, 120 Jackson, J.B. 162 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 152, 153 Jordan, Shirley 48, 49n44 Jorion, Thomas artist’s statement 177 ethical quandary 178 L’autre Amérique series 171–2 practice 173–4, 179, 179–80 travels 172–3 Vestiges d’empire series 31, 171–82 Jourde, Pierre 168 judgments 102

209

Kelsey, Robin 101 Kepel, Gilles 67 Kirkland, Stephane 51 Klee, Paul 42, 44 Klett, Mark 97 Kossakowski, Eustachy, 6 mètres avant Paris 68–72, 73, 74, 90–1 Kronental, Laurent 86–7, 89 La Bouilladisse 135 La Courtine mutiny, 1917 125–6 La France de Raymond Depardon 183 catalogue political landscapes 164–9 La France de Raymond Depardon series (Depardon) 143–69, 183 catalogue 144, 165–6 color scheme 152 comparison with Bailly 158–69 contribution 145 criticism 150–4 expedition 143–4 human forms 151, 154 impact 145 nostalgic potential 150–4 organization 155 and peripheral France 154–8 photographs 144 project 149–50 and road signs 149 title 145–6 vision of France 160, 166n66 vision of place 146–50 La Villedieu 127 Lafont, Suzanne 50, 113 Laloux, Victor 53 l’aménagement du territoire 98 lamentation 39 land art 43–4 landmarks 90 landscape agency 12 changes 95–102 as cultural resource 24 envisioning 5–6

210



language of 9n22 love affair with 17–19 metaphorical potential 117 observing 5 power to scape 6 vernacular 7, 17–19 Lang, Jack 22 Larousse, Pierre 62 Last, Nana 100–1 Latarjet, Bernard 19, 22, 24, 25 late photography 174–5 Lauras, Cécile 99 L’autre Amérique series (Jorion) 171–2 Lavessière, Paul-Hervé 66, 71 Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (film) 152, 153 Le grand ensemble series (Pernot) 80–6 le Grand Paris 87–8 Le Gray, Gustave 18, 19 Lee, Pamela 44 Les Halles, Paris 38 Les Limites de la France series (Millot) 108, 109 Les Valentins 99 Letourneux, François 96 Lévy, Jacques 20n51 Liévin 1–6 liminal space 70, 76, 120 literal transcription 17 lived experience 13 local conditions 16 local turn, the 110–14 Loue River 163 Lowe, Paul 11, 14 Lussault, Michel 65–6, 156, 159–60, 159n45, 164–5, 167n72 Lyon, Danny 34, 36, 37, 57 McDonald, Christie 181, 182 Macé, Marielle 107 Macfarlane, Robert 6n13, 9, 110, 134, 140 man-altered landscape 102 Marseille 35n8, 63n7

Marville, Charles 18, 19, 35 Maspero, François 66 Massey, Doreen 102, 158 materials, textures 77 Mathieu, Geoffroy 87 Matta-Clark, Gordon, Conical Intersect 43–5, 56–7 Meaux 81 Méaux, Danièle 95 Meinig, D.W. 5 memento mori 34, 124 memory 130–1, 163–4 Mendieta, Ana 44 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 119 Merriman, John 65 Messina, Patrick 103 Meyerowitz, Joel 174 microhistories 116, 126 micro-level changes 98–9 microspective 116, 128–9, 137 migrant crisis, Paris 72 migrant workers 59, 59n75 migrants 108, 183 Millet, Richard 167–8 Millot, Albin, Les Limites de la France series 108, 109 mindfulness 10 mise-en-abyme 45 Mission du Conservatoire du littoral 93–4 Mission héliographique, 1851 18, 24n62, 30, 93, 174 Mission photographique de la DATAR 22–6, 30, 93, 112–13, 145n4, 173 Mission photographique transmanche 93 Mitterrand, François 22 modernist detachment 58 modernity 9 modernization 55n61 Mollie-Stefulesco, Caroline 113 Mon paysage: Le paysage préféré des français 94 Mondrian, Piet 49 Monet, Claude 133, 162n55

Index money, and real estate 50–2 Monumental series (Tourneboeuf) 75 Mora, Gilles 19 movement, evoking 90 multisensual engagement 139 Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris 43 Nancy, Jean-Luc 33, 36, 50, 54, 122n28 narrative 101, 102 national identity 165–9, 181–2 national self-fashioning 7 national territory 181 Nazi Occupation 73n36, 125, 177 neutrality 26 New Topographics 25, 101–2, 105n32, 173 new towns 89 New York 25, 34–5, 36, 174 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore 17–27 Nogent-sur-Marne 38 non-places 16 Nord, Olivier 104 nostalgia 39, 71–2, 150, 156 nowhere, as somewhere 75, 76 Nulle part (Nowhere) series (Tourneboeuf) 75 observational force 12 Observatoire national photographique du paysage 30, 94–5, 95–102, 117 archive 100–1 function 96 intention 104 Les Valentins 99 local partners 95 local turn 110–14 observatoires 96–7 Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord 97 photographers 95, 97–8 rephotographic process 96–8 sequentiality of photographs 99–100

211

utilitarian imperative 101 views 95–6 website 100n19 Odell, Jenny 9, 10 Office of Culture Affairs 88 optical unconscious, the 60 optical power 48 ordinary affects 116, 138 Orientalism 179, 180 O’Sullivan, Timothy 97 Otterswiller 122 Pagès, Serge 55 Panaïté, Oana 181, 182 Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord 97, 117 Paris 18, 29, 160–1 arrondissements 62, 74 Au Rendez-vous des Routiers 55, 56 banlieues 29–30, 38n16, 64, 67, 86–92 boulevard Morland 59 boulevard périphérique 73–8 boulevard Saint-Germain 47–8 boulevards des maréchaux 74 Centre Pompidou 37–45, 54–7 Châtelet-Les Halles 168 city walls 68 the city’s edge 68–72 communes 74 Couturier’s Urban Archaeology series 46–54 Crédit Lyonnais bank 52–3, 58–9 départements 74 EB signs 69 Garnier Opera House 35 gates 76 growth 68 inhabitants 55–7 les grands ensembles 78–86 Les Halles 38 Liberation of 124 métro system 40–1 migrant crisis 72

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Museum of Decorative Arts 43 myth of 71–2 as nation’s symbolic center 62–3 obsession with 35–7, 111 periphery 61–92 Porte de la Chapelle 72 Quartier de l’Horloge 39, 45 rue du Quatre-Septembre 52–3 rue Saint-Martin 39 Second Empire 18 surface area 63n7 tourist sites 105 urban transformation 54–60 zones 29–30 Paris Biennale, 1975 43–4 Paskins, Jacob 37–8n14, 57, 59n75 past, the, uncovering 2 patrimony, expanded understanding of 141 Paysages français. Une aventure photographique, 1984–2017 exhibition 26–7, 180–1 Paysages insoumis series (Girard) 30–1, 120, 122–9 Paysageur (journal) 26 Perec, Georges 161 peripheral France 154–8 peripheral vision 65 périphérique, the, Paris 73–8 Périphérique series (Tourneboeuf) 74–8 Pernot, Mathieu 29–30 Implosions series 84–6 Le grand ensemble series 80–6 perspective 82, 89–90, 91, 163 Petitjean, Marc 29, 46, 75, 84–5, 172 Métro Rambuteau project 37–45, 50, 54–7 photobooks 117–18 photographic act, the 107 photographic agencies 25 photographic missions 93–4 FTL 94, 102–10, 110–14 local turn 110–14 OPP 94–5, 95–102, 110–14, 117

photographic optics 14–15 photographie plasticienne, la 25 photography 35, 60 power of 96, 123 role of 9–10 topographically aware 9 photojournalism 25 Piano, Renzo 40, 54n57 Picard, Georges 115 picture making 10–11 picturesque landscapes 121, 162 Pinson, Stephen 52 place attention to 8–16, 27–32 definition 3n5 Depardon’s vision of 146–50 experience of 9, 10 Girard’s vision of 3 imaging 2 representation of 139 sense of 13, 117, 148–9 ties to 158 Place and Locality in Modern France (Whalen and Young) 114 poetry 117 point of view 6n13, 13 Poivert, Michel 24n62, 25–6, 151–2 political landscapes 164–9 Porte de la Chapelle, Paris 72 postcards 80–2, 83, 86, 150–4 post-industrial landscapes 4–5 precarious lives 55–7 presence 54 prices 53n53 Pritchard, Sara 111n44 progress 42, 44–5 Pruitt-Igoe development, Saint Louis, Missouri 85–6 Ptaszkowska, Anka 71–2 public housing 78–86 Quartier de l’Horloge, Paris 39, 45 Rabin, Gilles 66, 67 Rauschenberg, Christopher 97

Index real estate, and money 50–2 reality, capturing 102–3 refugees 106–8 reminiscence 42 resilience 158 revelatory power 14 Rice, Shelley 42 Rigouste, Mathieu 59n75, 183 Ristelhueber, Sophie 113n50 road trips 117 Rochester, NY, New Topographics exhibition 25 Roger, Alain 24, 130 Rogers, Richard 40, 54n57, 74 Romantic sublime, the 105 Roncherolles-en-Bray 138–9 rootedness 148 Ross, Kristin 55n61, 73 Rouillé, André 53 roundabouts 156–7 rue du Quatre-Septembre, Paris 52–3 rue Saint-Martin, Paris 39 ruin gazing 174 ruin porn 180n27 Ruscha, Ed 51 Saint Louis, Missouri, Pruitt-Igoe development 85–6 Saint-Amé, church of, Liévin 4 Salle des fêtes series (Girard) 120, 120–1, 121–2 Saltzman, Lisa 123 Sansot, Pierre 137 Sarkozy, Nicolas 87 scale 111 Schilling, Derek 62 Schumpeter, Joseph 34 Schwartz, Vanessa 84n69 Sebald, W.G. 160 Second World War 112, 121–2, 124, 125, 127, 177 security 55n61 segregation 55n61 sequentiality 99–100, 101, 102 serious noticing 28

shared space 159 Shore, Stephen 117 Sicard, Monique 26n65, 58 significance 4 silences 150 simulated lives 9 Sinclair, Iain 71 slave labor 175 slippage 107–8 slowness 137 Smith, Joel 35 Smith, Shawn Michelle 60 Smithson, Robert 44 SNCF 113n50 Snyder, Joel 14, 15 social body, the, purification 55n61 social convulsion 55 social housing projects 78–86 social realities 58 software 46 Soja, Edward 20n51 Sommer, Marie 105 space abstraction of 49 layerings 47 spatial recalibration 9–10 spatial turn, the 20 spectacular reality 84n69 spectropoetics 177 speculation 51–2 stereotypes 159n46 Stewart, Kathleen 138, 139 Stieglitz, Alfred 85 Stoler, Ann Laura 176, 178 storied ground 28 Strasbourg 121 Suleiman, Susan 181, 182 surveillance 128 symbolism 117, 124–5 tableau form 132 tableaux 48–9, 119 Tarnac Affair, the 127–8 témoins 82 temporalities 45

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tension 91 territoire 7, 14, 16, 19, 75, 92, 99, 113, 121, 143, 155, 159, 165 texts 39 textures 77 Tézenas, Ambroise 105 Thiollier, Félix 18 topographic change 94 topographic conditions 28 topographic confusion 38 topographic imaginary, the 3 topographic photography 11–14 topographic turn, the 17–27, 65–6 topohilia 5 Toulouse 160 Tourneboeuf, Patrick 29–30 Monumental series 75 Nulle part (Nowhere) series 75 Périphérique series 74–8 Tours Aillaud, Nanterre 89 traces 54–60, 116, 120–9, 163–4, 177n14 traffic and transportation 108–10 transitional space 70 transoceanic legacy 31, 171–82 trompe-l’oeil 47–8 Troxler’s fading 65 Une campagne photographique series (Cuisset) 133–5, 138–9 unfamiliarity, and familiarity 6–7 United States of America 24–5, 101–2 universalizing tendency 169 unofficial countryside 27 unremarkable landscapes 2 Urban Archaeology series (Couturier) 29, 46–54, 58–60 urban planning 41, 63–4, 74 urban renewal zones 86 vanishing points 50

Vermeren, Pierre 157 vernacular landscapes 7, 17–19 Vestiges d’empire series (Jorion) 31, 171–82 Vexin Regional Nature Park 89 Viallet, Emilie 110 Vietnam 174 viewer, the 52 violence 85 of demolition 39 visibility 119, 120 visual information 15 vital materiality 12 von Conta, Béatrix 183 Flux series 108–10 Wakeman, Rosemary 38n17 Wall, Jeff 48, 90 water towers 89 Watkins, Carleton 97 Weiner, Cyrille 87 Welch, Edward 50, 164 Wells, Liz 6n13, 13, 18–19, 148 Weston, Edward 14, 15 Whalen, Philip 112 Wombell, Paul 103 Wood, James 28 workers 57–60, 183 World Trade Center, New York 34–5 Wylie, John 139 Yacavone, Kathrin 32 yellow vest protests 157 Young, Patrick 112 Zola, Emil 2, 121 zones of the real 7 zones urbaines sensibles 86 Zouyene, Jehane 166n66