Photo: Jean-Luc GOUDOT, 2002.

Longing for the Past in the Belly of Paris

By Mayanne Wright with David Applefield
"Paris is a theater where the cost of a seat is wasted time." - Robert Doisneau

The quote by France´s most celebrated humanist photographer opens Doisneau´s Hotel de Ville exhibit, "Paris Les Halles". And it makes me nod in consent.

I´m in this long, snaking queue to get my jolt of the same sentimentality - in high-contrast black and white - that millions associate with the City of Light.

With a career spent documenting the streets, people, and daily life in Paris, Robert Doisneau (1912-94) is largely responsible for the romantic image of the city we continue to love in his terms-the man in a beret, Parisian children playing in the Champs de Mars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and of course photography´s most immortal moment, couples kissing, Le baiser de l´Hotel de Ville ("The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville"). Doisneau´s kiss is to photography as Rodin´s thinker is to sculpture. Everyone of us on this line in the rain is here for the same gushy reason, to relive the authenticity of a nostalgia that´s captured on postcard racks everywhere, to reenact the daydream of being in love which countless female students capture with scotchtape over their desks and beds during semesters abroad. All this is Doisneau´s lovely fault.

I peered over my neighbors´ shoulders, and then managed to insert myself between clumps of gazers. That´s the viewer´s predicament at popular art shows.

The centerpiece of the expo, though, is not that kiss or that beret, but the city´s former central marché, Les Halles, once known as the "belly of Paris", where fishmongers and marchant du volaille unloaded wholesale quantities of produce to the cities restauranteurs and shoppers. The same Les Halles which ultimately was replaced by the sprawling and soulless suburban Rungis, ten kilometers south of the city in the direction of Orly and left the city with a void that challenged architects and city planners, and played with the memory of place.

Struck by the light, the movement of the figures in the marketplace, how they seemed to dance in and out of the space, timelessly. The smile of a vegetable vender slipped off the photo and onto my face. I looked around. The worry lines and hunched bodies of my fellow Parisians had relaxed; they too had been transported to another ethos, a Paris that is gone forever.

This I imagine was the purpose of this Paris municipal exhibit, free and open to the public, to remember, to feel pride, to be absorbed by their heritage. Each Doisneau photograph seemed to demand this. And although from Austin, Texas I feel profoundly and obsessively Parisienne.

I reach the 1971 image of the gaping hole left after the destruction of the old market pavilions. A lunar crater. It looks nothing like the sprawling urban shopping mall, park, RER station, and playground millions visit and either love or hate each year.

Today, construction barriers, cranes, dust and noise once again occupy Les Halles. Less than 50 years after its post-market reconstruction, the infrastructure of this shopping and transportation hub finds itself in desperate need of renewal and rethinking, as do so much of disco-age 70s structures everywhere. Parts of the Les Halles neighborhood have been gutted again. Many of us avoid them when trips to the FNAC or Go Sport can be sacrificed.

I turn back to Doisneau for one last look. I get my fix. I walk past the display charting current construction plans for the new belly of Paris, open my umbrella, smile, and head out to the great place in front of the city hall dreaming of course of the kiss.

"Paris Les Halles" will be showing until April 28, 2012 in the Salon d´accueil at the Mairie de Paris, 29 rue de Rivoli, metro: Hotel de Ville. Hours: 10h until 19h, everyday but Sunday.

From David Applefield´s "Paris on My Mind"

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