Photos by Jean-Michel Landon within the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum | EUROtoday

Dass die Suburbs of Paris unknown land can now not be mentioned even in Paris. For years there have been increasingly more photographers, usually from the banlieue themselves, who take pictures of them after which show their footage in galleries past the suburbs. Like Marvin Bonheur, whose pictures had been first proven at “L'Imprimerie” in Paris. Or like Mohamed Bourouissa, who confirmed works from his “Périphériques” sequence, which he created in 2004 and 2008, on the photograph pageant in Arles. Laurent Kronental has additionally lengthy been identified past Nanterre, the place he created a photographic monument to the towers of the “Cité Pablo Picasso”.

What usually unites the works of those artists is their documentary character. The need to immortalize an structure and concrete panorama that would not maintain the long run promise of its creation and that’s progressively disappearing in the midst of large-scale city renewal work. The photos usually mirror the need to make seen a world about which all kinds of commentators (and politicians) imagine they know every little thing potential, with out this information being based mostly on native information. The photographic view is commonly benevolent, nearly romanticizing and positively meant to alter the attitude of those that don’t come from the banlieues.

This might be additionally the aim of Jean-Michel Landon, born in 1978 in Créteil, within the southeast of Paris, the place, after dropping out of his psychology research, he labored as a social employee, particularly in Sablières. There he started taking images as a self-taught photographer. In 2011 and inspired by the passion of the residents, as said within the present devoted to him in Mannheim's Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, he started engaged on his first documentation. “La vie des blocs” opens an in any other case closed door into the Cité, the place day by day life takes place on the road – on curbs, in doorways and vehicles. A life during which a whole lot of time is killed – with soccer and bicycle stunts, card video games and smoking weed. A masculine world that Jean-Michel Landon additionally appears to be like at with sympathy, regardless of all of the masculinity displayed in his footage, regardless of the preventing canines, medicine and shackles.

His photos deal with gestures of conviviality and scenes of play that evoke the solidarity that’s usually spoken of in relation to banlieues, no less than on the a part of those that stay life there. Jean-Michel Landon lets a couple of of them have their say, akin to Dalia C., 35, who says she finds the brand new buildings stunning and fashionable. “But I don’t know anyone there and I miss my old neighborhood. When I open a window now, it is dead quiet, like a cemetery.” Landon works with mirror results and symmetrical picture compositions, that are picked up by the hanging within the Mannheim museum in such a approach that small triptychs are created. A triptych of gaming on the smartphone, one in all hanging out.

A big a part of his photographic documentation consists of portraits, which additionally inform of the spectacular belief that Jean-Michel Landon should have loved within the Cité, the place he mentioned he spent years. Men just like the “Chain Smoker” (2019) drop the masks of cigarette and hood for a second and maintain the gaze of his digital camera. The few girls who could be seen within the present, as in the event that they play no position on this road life, keep away from it and reveal themselves on this approach.

The close-ups present a mutilated, scratched arm lined in burn holes (“Life Pain”, 2022) and two boys laughing in one another's faces, in a second of best complicity – on this area of stress between brutality and humanity, the picture of a banlieue emerges In some methods it corresponds to expectations, however in some ways it’s utterly totally different than you might need thought.

Block life. Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim; till June thirtieth. No catalog.