Ode à France {dernier projet}.

Here lies my last project for my French photography class. Enjoy (and, as always, comment if you please)!

Buildings. Space. Land.

Tension.

Rootedness and up-rootedness.

"I don't regret the numerous pictures of Brigitte Bardot, but I'd rather have a good photograph of my father."

Identity. 

Did all this conjure up a portrait of twentieth century french photographer Raymond Depardon? Well that's alright. To me, he's something of a hodge-podge of ideologies and sentimentality, all summed up by his grand commission from the state of France to capture, well, France.

Depardon scoured the country seeking for areas of "tension"; he photographed objects, particularly buildings, that cohabitated in  space and told (people-lessly) the story and history of a people that is inseparable from that people's fierce attachment to the land. 

So for my final photographic reflection on Paris and my little "Ode to Depardon," I thought I ought to pay hommage to some of the tensions, or apparent incongruencies, that give France and French culture their identities to me.

Take, for instance, the fact that one of the reasons Paris is Paris is because everyone wants to be there, so they bring their country along with them.

And snuggle the converging architectural style right in, nice and cozy.

 

Or take the tension between the universal, unrestrained joy of early childhood, and the necessity of growing into the determinedly indifferent french girls young french girls must inevitably become.

 

And then there are other, deeper stirrings. Culture and counter-culture.France's proud past of the classical Academy and the reality of post-revolution iconoclasm.

All brought together in the ever-present cultural melting pot of the Metro.

 

Depardon used "tension" to represent images that were "so French." 

Perhaps he wouldn't even have taken the following picture or seen anything culturally significant in its subject matter, but to a foreign eye the charm of an elderly jogger literally stopping to hop the fence and smell the roses is endless. And so very French.

 

It's probably inevitable that my Ode to French Identity is thus fueled and restricted by own identity. That is, because these things are "so French" to me, it probably just shows how not French I am.

But this tension creates a startingly new identity of its own. Before I came to France (as silly as it sounds), I never really thought of myself as "American". I defined myself by my gender, my hobbies, my interests, my religion. I was a Mormon, a theater nerd, a francophile. In the very American tradition, I prided myself in my freedom to be an individual and defined myself accordingly.

But how else can you explain the strange pang of comfort and irony in turning the corner to witness a sight so "very french," but also with a name so very American that it makes me smile? I feel like we know each other. I get it. 

Bearing in mind it's named after a state (and region) I've never even been to, and if I sat down at one of the smokey tables to order, I would undoubtedly make many cultural and linguistic fumbles before finally sinking back in an uneasy sigh of relief and starting to think of home.