Thomas Boivin, “Belleville”

Thomas Boivin’s Belleville has its roots in this tradition: the same predilection – let’s say, the same talent – for black and white, a taste for wandering the streets of Paris and, above all, a particular affection for this composite and popular neighbourhood of the 19th district.
But the analogy with the history of French photography stops there Thomas Boivin was able to create his “portrait” of a neighbourhood, alternating human figures, landscapes and urban signs, more by forgetting about it than by referring to it. His way of seeing things is inspired primarily by American photography and authors such as Mark Steinmetz, Robert Adams and Judith Joy Ross, whom he likes to quote. It’s true that his photographs illustrate a relationship with the world and an intimate experience that have little to do with the picturesque or anecdotal image of Paris that has been conveyed for nearly half a century.
The perimeter of his Belleville is a personal matter. It goes beyond traditional and conventional boundaries to cover a large part of North-East Paris. Those who know the heights of the Buttes Chaumont, the lower Belleville or the teeming agora of the Place de la République may recognise places, but those who don’t will read a different kind of narrative, one of immersion and impression, one that probes the atmosphere of a motley and carefree setting, reporting disordered façades, wasteland-like nooks and crannies and pointing out more or less domesticated, more or less exuberant plant life:

there is no descriptive topography, no captions or narrative, just vocabulary of shapes, textures and shadows. As the photographer himself explains, his images are with and within Belleville, rather than about Belleville.
Thomas Boivin’s approach combines ritual and intuition. The ritual is the habit he has developed, year after year, of walking with his camera through the streets of Belleville and then setting it down every day on the Place de la République, where people meet up. Intuition is a way of understanding the ordinary, the everyday that inhabits and animates this environment. The people photographed – passers-by, local residents – seem to enjoy this setting and to blend in with it. Others, on the contrary, stand out. In both cases, the faces are exposed without artifice or pretence. There is no forced passage, just mutual honesty between the person in front of the lens and the author behind the camera. Thomas Boivin does not conceal himself; he knows how to approach his fellow human beings and establish the appropriate distance: to the intelligence of places, he adds the intelligence of others and of encounters.
The gentleness of this human contact, visible in people’s eyes and attitudes, is as compelling as it is pleasing. It shatters the idea that it has become difficult to photograph our contemporaries in the public space: Thomas Boivin’s Belleville brings street photography back to life.

Director of the Maison de la photographie Robert Doisneau (Robert Doisneau House of Photography) in Gentilly