There were I think nine shows with “vernissages” on Thursday evening and I’d sat down the previous night and worked out a complicated route to visit half a dozen of them, finding short cuts on the complex system of routes which make up the metro system. But in the end I only made it to three.
Thanks to my seeing so many shows in the afternoon, we got off to a late start, rushing to the station and just missing a train. Of course they are so frequent this shouldn’t had been a problem, but although the next arrived three minutes later and we got on it, it moved no further. There were announcements, but none gave any idea of how long the hold-up was likely to last, and after ten minutes we decided to jump off and walk to the first show.
Work by 3 of the 5 photographers at Lieu37
Lieux de passage (Crossing Points) at Lieu37 in the rue des Petites Ecuries in the 10e was a group show with 5 photographers, three of them professionals and two amateurs, photojournalist Christophe Lepetit, artist and director Frédéric Lemaitre, Grégoire Vopel, Jay Lag, and neurologist Yves Samson. It was, as the programme promised a deliberately eclectic show, and included some strange revolving triangular blocks with images on the three sides, as well as some highly enlarged i-phone images, which I felt would have looked better very much smaller, perhaps around postcard size. And although I couldn’t imagine ever hanging one of the images on a wall, I could see them selling well as cards for sending notes. The most interesting work to me was the blurred images of empty corridors and similar scenes, one of which is on the show site (image 9) but there are no details available there about it, and I seem to have lost the information I had about this set of work.
It was hard to get Linda away from the gallery and on to the appropriate metro station to take us to the next venue, Galerie Goutte de Terre on the rue Godefroy Cavaignac in the 11e, where the show was Krung Thep: la cité des anges, photographs by Pierre Raimond of street children in Bangkok (its Thai name Krung Thep means ‘city of angels’.) The photographer was accidentally invited into the world of street children in the city and produced some powerful portraits of them. After phtoographing them for some time he was refused permission to continue his work, but the children themselves were happy to have their pictures taken but with their faces hidden, and these images were among the most striking in the show. These were images that engaged me powerfully, and was one of the more interesting shows I found in those I saw in the fringe festival.
From here it was a fairly short walk to the next opening, A stone never dreams / Une pierre ne rêve pas at Le 19 in rue Trousseau (also in the 11e.) Franz Manni, born in Italy in 1973, has worked as an anthropologist in a Paris museum since 2000 as well as as a photographer, and perhaps because of his work has excluded people from these photographs, which look instead at structures and patterns formed in nature by human interventions. There was a strange quality to his images of patterns in water flowing over a weir or piles of materials by walls that intrigued me, though I find it hard to put into words why. These are certainly highly metaphoric images which Manni calls a way of reclaiming our dreams. In the gallery along with the pictures were some poems from the book Land of Stone by the American writer Karen Chase, in which Manni says he found the same spirit as his images, and one of which provided the title for his show:
I am a stone / a stone is good / it sits on a field / it never worries / it never dreams /
The poems in this book resulted from two years of weekly meetings with a severely withdrawn patient, in a locked ward of a large psychiatric hospital outside New York. Ben had given up speaking and social interactions and as therapy she engaged him in creating poetry. They would pass a writing pad to each other, taking turns in writing a line, engaging in a struggle for him to come out of his silence. There is perhaps something of a similar struggle evident in these pictures.
By this time the three openings had begun to take their toll (it would have seemed impolite not to have a glass or two of wine while looking at the pictures), and Linda had left me to go to a lecture and concert. I took the metro to go to the next show on my list, but when I got to the address could find nothing, not even a gallery and certainly no show. Probably I had gone to the wrong place, but I never found out.
I took a few pictures walking the night streets, which although dark should have been possible at ISO 3200, but few if any were sharp. My problem was the 20mm not focussing correctly. Although it is an f2.8 lens it seems to have a problem in lowish light on the D800E, though I’d not really noticed before using it on the D700. On autofocus it hunts very noisily noisily and excessively for focus at times; I’d noticed this particulary when photographing pictures at Paris Photo, when it often entirely failed to focus when I put a focus point on the picture frame (which I thought should make its job easy), but was usually better on the edge of the image. So much of the time I’d given up using it on autofocus, using scale focus and expecting the depth of field to cover any inaccuracy. But at night the focus scale gets difficult to use (its not much in good light) and it’s also very easy to alter the focus without meaning to. Especially after a few drinks.
I stood on the street outside where I thought the gallery should be wondering where to go next, whether to spend longer trying to find the show or perhaps to go on to the next. It was perhaps getting a little late to go on to the next venue and I was hungry and tired and decided that this was perhaps a sign to me that I should go and eat and then rest.
More pictures from Paris shortly on My London Diary.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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