Elise (Paris) 0
While The Course of History explores the relationship between landscape, history and memory, in Juliette à Paris I am taking a look at place and sites laced with history of a lighter nature, as a way of saying that every place has a past.
Each image documents a location in Paris featured in the films of French actor Juliette Binoche. Binoche embodies Paris, and by extension Europe to me and her career took off in the late 80s, around the time I left Belgium for the United States. This project, like The Course of History, is a way of reconnecting with the continent I left behind. Traveling to Paris and shooting these sites was both a Proustian exercise, a way to delve into lost time, and a chance to experience Paris in a new way. The featured sites span roughly 30 years of Binoche’s career, a time paralleling my time living in the US and a time during which photography changed dramatically, moving from analog to digital. Using an 8 x 10 pinhole camera was a way to take the medium back to its basics and allude to the early images of Paris in the 19th century. The subtitles are the lines spoken by Binoche in that particular scene. With the images arranged randomly, these subtitles create a new, absurd narrative that seems to revolve around a discussion in a troubled relationship.