Photographer Laurent Kronental has been visiting the large housing projects that were built round Paris from the 1950s onwards to address the urgent need for more housing, in the face of mass immigration and the move out of the city centre to the suburbs. Today the optimism and belief in the positive power of architecture that inspired these vast modernist estates seem hopelessly dated in the face of the dystopias of alienation that they've become. It's the same old story: loved by architects, but not so much by the people who live there.
Tinted with melancholy, his resulting photographic series, Souvenir d'un Futur, exposes these unsung suburban areas but reveals a beauty behind the modernist utopia that had so much promise and wonder. A project that was four years in the making, Laurent combines a mixture of sensitive portraits of older residents along with beautiful architectural photographs that offer pleasing geometric compositions of what feels like a crumbling, ghostly world.
[Photos © Laurent Kronental]
It's noticeable that the photographer's chosen only elderly white subjects for his portraits here. I suppose he's not making any claims that this is an accurate presentation of what life's like in these estates - which would in fact, as viewers of Spiral will know, have plenty of North African immigrants. The pictures were taken early in the morning, when the normal ebb and flow of life isn't evident, and the photographer is after that particular feeling of melancholy, and the alienation of this older generation. Well, fair enough. It's his vision...
No graffiti either. Nothing to sully the architect's dream.
Posted by: StarDasher | January 20, 2021 at 11:29 AM
And worth noting that they were pretty much all built by Communist or Socialist councils & architects. Which tends to be a bit....underplayed....when it comes round to making excuses.
Posted by: Martin Adamson | January 20, 2021 at 03:16 PM