Gray Paris

Paris, photographed through thousands of lenses (Japanese tourists experiencing a moment of mechanized eternity on every bridge), consumed daily by the greedy gazes of the photographic devices deployed by tourists from various continents, has not ceased to exist ... It lives on, endlessly resisting the onslaught of gazes. There's the lighthearted Paris of song, the Paris of romantic snapshots: the stairs of Montmartre, the setting sun's rays on the Pont Neuf, the autumn leaves in the Luxembourg Garden, the frivolous Paris of films. But there's also another Paris.
    All who've come to this city by way of Europe's (or America's) provinces remember the first album of Parisian photos we viewed at a friend's or flipped through with a mixture of rapture and disdain while visiting some aunt or uncle: rooftops on the lie Saint-Louis, the church of Saint-Germain (the Romanesque style blended in this name with recollections of some Gothic Juliette Greco), a gentle wave on the gray Seine.
    We leafed through this album with a touch of scorn, since the longing to visit this mythical city was mixed with a vivid sense that these photographs, intended precisely for us provincials, were in fact classic tourist kitsch. I don't know why, but autumn always prevailed in those delicate, pastel pictures, as if the albums' editors knew that November's sweet warmth best captures France's capital.
    The best-known city in Europe ... So well known that newcomers from other countries, nourished on movies, postcards, and those autumnal albums above which rises a slim, anorexic Eiffel Tower, scarcely feel any surprise: we know it, we know this place, they cry. We know that tower, the Parisian rooftops, the clipped boughs of the plane trees, the little trapezoidal squares on which two Paulownia trees grow. We know the cafe gardens and the little homes nestled up against Haussmann's showy structures. We know the metro line where, on wintry afternoons, you can stare directly into strangers' apartments-and the imperial facades of Napoleonic edifices.
    To photograph Paris-after all this! After painters, sketchers, photographers, after memoirists and writers! After Walter Benjamin and Paul Léautaud! Is it possible?
    Apparently so. You just have to try-and to possess a "point of view," not talent and a good camera alone. I have before me the photographs of Bogdan Konopka, depicting a Paris I know well. At first glance, though, I can't seem to get my bearings-I don't know these houses, these court-yards, I don't know this derelict railway or this park sprinkled with snow. Where is the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where's my favorite bookshop, where's the garden of the Palais Royal with its young lindens? They're not here, I see only anemic little streets, flimsy houses, unprepossessing stairwells. Above all, I don't find the splendid Parisian light, the refulgence with which the oceanic Atlantic climate repays Paris for the rain, the towering cumuli, the cold and damp it provides all winter, spring and fall. Bogdan Konopka's photographs show a faded city; paradoxically they too have something autumnal about them, like the more conventional albums I've mentioned. Here, though, the mute, matte still lifes of streets take the place of golden leaves and subtle shadows: this is actual, aggravating November.
    I can perfectly imagine the outrage of Paris's admirers, be they French or foreign. Where's the light? Where the Pont des Arts? I can hear the angry voices: this photographer's driven by malice. He's come from some small, dark country, maybe even a small, dark town in a small, dark country, and wants to strip Paris of its majestic light, its bright sandstone columns, its freshly scrubbed Pantheon, its beautiful broad streets, the new pyramid in the Louvre's courtyard, its splendid museums.
    Does the perpetrator of these photographs thus require a defense? And what shape might this plaidoyer take?
    I see several lines of potential defense. First, the counsel for the defense might appeal to the dominant aesthetic of today's photography, its muted mood, as well as the distinctive "turpism"-that is, an infatuation with "ugliness" in both subject matter and its formal presentation-that seems to typify the work of contemporary art photographers. And certainly the chief motive is resistance to commercial photography: photography's beauty has been hijacked, abducted by the cunning craftsmen of the camera, fashion photographers, the creators of the covers for popular women's magazines. They don't lack for beauty: every page of Elle or Vogue proudly displays lovely photographs of lovely girls, lovely homes, lovely spring meadows above which lovely birds glide.
    The counsel for the defense might take into consideration the age's aesthetics. And this wouldn't be to the detriment of Konopka's work. Acknowledging the norms of his own historical moment doesn't discredit him in the least.
    But the defense must go further. It must prove that some- thing else is at stake here. Bogdan Konopka does this remark- able city a service by showing us another Paris, the Paris of courtyards and gray stairwells, the Paris of gloomy afternoons. By evoking the secret fraternity of all cities, beautiful and ugly, he liberates Paris from the isolation into which it has been thrust by its own eminence, its unique status among the European capitals. Since how can one live a normal life, die a normal death in a Paris shown only from its finest, most glittering angle, displayed only in its most "imperial," elegant, ministerial light?
    Anyone who's ever driven across the Czech Republic, Poland, or eastern Germany has no doubt seen boundlessly sad, gray towns and cities. Clearly Paris shares nothing in common with them, it's totally different-and yet, Konopka tells us in his photographs' calm voice, take a closer look at certain Parisian neighborhoods, streets, courtyards. And you'll perceive in them, as in an ancient mosaic, fragments of Mikolow and Pilsen, chips of Myslenice and East Berlin. This won't be lèse-mjesté, it's not attempted assassination; no, it's rather an effort to find what the great metropolis shares with a modest town on Europe's peripheries. It's an attempt to cast a bridge between the meek, the mundane, and imperial glory.
    While looking at these photographs, I also noticed that there's not a single scrap of the Paris erected by Baron Haussmann's titanic efforts. (I should confess that this Paris annoys me at times with its bourgeois regularity, the solidity of the buildings designed to house the Notary, the Physician, the Engineer, the Lawyer, the Pharmacist and the Dentist.) We're dealing here with the pre- and post-Haussmann Paris, a city still containing traces of organic medieval construction (as in the surviving islets of old Paris) as well as modernity's chaos.
    Finally-as Konopka's defense lawyer might conclude-the grayness of this Paris may reflect a certain disillusionment that is difficult, even shameful, to express, the disillusionment so well described by Czeslaw Milosz. Of course people are still enchanted by what is truly enchanting, and they still go on pilgrimage to Paris. But they also sense a certain lack. The city still exists, of course, it stands, washed by André Malraux, enhanced by new museums and monumental structures, but the great light of intellect that once reigned here, that drew young writers and artists from throughout the world-Jerzy Stempowski speaks mournfully of a Central Laboratory that has closed up shop-has dimmed, faded, and even the eyes of cameras accustomed to registering other parameters, more physical in nature, can't help noticing. Bogdan Konopka took pictures of Paris, not its myth.

AZ

Y chang Bến Tầu Sài Gòn.

Cảnh này thì lại giống phía bên kia Thủ Thiêm, xa xa là cầu Calmette.