An Overcast Day Of Street Findings
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Another day of moody weather, with the sky the color of an underslept eyeball. Not a great time for ambient light, which today could make even Hindu wedding photos or American dentistry look dull and unflattering. So I shifted focus to street observations and left monuments for a brighter day.
The Saint-Jacques Tower, the only surviving part of a 16th-century church wrecked by French Revolution malcontents, viewed from Rue Saint-Martin. 75004 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
Silhouetted in the cold light of the overcast morning is this statue of Blaise Pascal, viewed sidelong, on its lonely perch at the base of the Saint-Jacques Tower. Lexia Snowe, 2020
Picasso-style street art in an airvent on Rue Pernelle. 75004 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
Adama Traoré and George Floyd
Some words here on the two companion pieces of street art below. Adorning the corner wall in a pedestrian-heavy street by the Centre Pompidou, the pieces advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement. (It disturbs me, in some ways, to call it a "movement", because black lives mattering is a basic tenet of humanity, not a debatable idea, whereas a movement is something in which we may choose to participate or not. There is already a movement predicating on black lives mattering, and it's called possessing humanity, which is not voluntary but central to existing in society. That it has become necessary to have an additional formal "movement" is gut-twistingly awful to me, reflecting as it does the collapse of something basic, perhaps even something foundational, in collective humanity.)
The pieces, whose artist tag is "Seven":
Street art at the corner of Rue Rambuteau / Rue Quincampoix, near the Centre Pompidou. This piece, addressing the death of George Floyd, is on the Rue Rambuteau side of the corner. The artist tag is "Seven", with "@ seven parisstreet" (sic) painted alongside, although there is no Instagram account of that name. 75003 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
And this piece, inspired by the death of Adama Traoré, is on the Rue Quincampoix side. 75003 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
In the second piece, "Adama T" refers to Adama Traoré, who died in 2016 while in the custody of Paris police. During arrest, Adama was pinned down by three officers, a fact to which his family and some independent medical examiners attribute his subsequent respiratory failure and death. Internal review by the police found no culpability, and magistrates initially agreed. Because of the similarities in the circumstances of their deaths, the murder of African-American George Floyd in May 2020 reignited anger over Adama's death in France this summer, with protests in Paris, Lyon, and Toulouse. Those same magistrates have since ordered a new medical report from doctors outside France; at time of writing, the results are pending.
My personal interpretation is that the round-faced figure appearing alone in Je ne peux pas respirez, and as one of several such figures in I Can't Breathe, represents mother and sister. George Floyd's mother was who he called on in the moments before he died, while Adama Traoré's sister Assa has become a campaigner against police brutality in Adama's name.
Note too the exaggerated manhood of the officers... dark humor, and a psychosexual comment on violence and masculinity.
Homelessness in Paris
Some thoughts now on the image below. Like everywhere, Paris has problems. Increasingly like everywhere, those problems include homelessness. Paris's homeless problem is nowhere near as conspicuous, concentrated or shabby as L.A.'s -- I have seen no Skid Row here, and no mother and child curled up in a shopping cart in a heart-breaking parody of pietà that I've never forgotten. Instead, there are clean and orderly tents dotted on the broader of the sidewalks; well-constructed makeshift dwellings below the river bridges; and bodies -- alive, presumably, but as unmoving and covered as the dead -- cocooned in sleeping bags under public benches.
I don't know if the pandemic has ripped at the welfare safety net and the homelessness I'm seeing (or the extent of it, at least) is only a few months old -- if it is catastrophic more than systemic (the USA's own homeless problem I would categorize as the latter). What is striking, though, is that the people themselves largely stay out of sight, anonymizing themselves as much as they can. I am told it is still shameful to be homeless here, considered more a personal failure than a social one. Maybe that is why I can tell you what homeless living looks like in Paris, but nothing at all of homeless faces. Are all ethnicities proportionately represented or is one race more vulnerable to homelessness than others? Same question for age, gender, or health. Of course, faces alone wouldn't convey all of this information, but they would provide the beginnings of contours. And if the homeless showed their faces, I could meet their eyes and say, "Hey, good morning", and thereby let them know there's nothing to be ashamed about. When someone falls down, we don't criticize them for being weak -- we help them get back up.
Here's the image:
A homeless tent in the Marais, backdropped by graffiti advocating for abortion ("Abortion for all"). Rue Pastourelle, 75003 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
I was struck by the quiet dignity of this tent in the Marais: the shoes aligned neatly outside, the poised dustpan and brush. Then I considered the spraypaint behind it, which I hope -- don't you? -- is not someone's comment on the tent but a remnant from before its arrival. It means: "Abortion for all".
The City of Love (Scrabble)
Street art on the corner of Rue Caulaincourt, viewed from the Rue Joseph de Maistre, with the treetops of the Montmartre Cemetery in its backdrop. 75018 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
The same shot, now with a stressed-looking young man in it, which may overall be a better capture of love... no? Lexia Snowe, 2020