Ant!foto magazine no. 7

May 2024

Issue 7 of Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber’s magazine Ant!foto focuses on the topics of the street, the city and photography. With interviews with Paul Grund, Myr Muratet, Hannah Darabi & Benoit Grimbert, DJ Sundae, Natacha Nisic, Christian Omodeo, and Damarice Amao. I contributed an essay on my native city of Paris, “Falling back in love with the city”. Here is an extract:

The Grand Paris project’s stated aim is “to preserve the quality of life and guarantee the well-being of its residents … and to build the long-term future of the Ile-de-France region.” As part of this urban rethink, in recent years the city has been redeveloping many of its major public spaces, from the Place de la République to the rue de Rivoli. Each time a new redevelopment is unveiled we are told exactly how these spaces are going to be used by people, with designated areas for all the desirable urban behaviours (children playing, people exercising, enjoying a new pocket of greenery). However, these spaces are never used according to plan. They become sites of protest or are taken over by communities who are not given spaces of their own and therefore need to use whichever ones they can. That is arguably what cities are best at—confounding official expectations and making creative, resourceful use of urban space, what Paul Grund describes as diverting the city from its original function.

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While the idea of the city has shifted from one associated with modern fantasies of a level playing field where everyone is welcome and anyone can make it, to an ever-growing list of problems that urgently need solving, humans will not be turning their backs on the urban experiment anytime soon.

Rather than channelling our technological obsession into trying to design a perfectly functioning city, should we not be learning to embrace the chaos? As Natasha Nisic suggests, what if we replaced the idea of one gigantic cohesive organism with the notion of interconnected islands, where everyone had a piece of land of their own to inhabit and put to use. I, for one, would like to see what that city might look like.