People. Gross. Not normally my thing. People elbow to elbow, like clothes hung up in a closet. People maneuvering shopping carts around and into each other at the grocery store. People trampling people underfoot to see fireworks mark a New Year — near limitless potential for personal change. People sitting inches from one another, awaiting the verdict in a courtroom. Ick! If you’re nodding your head and thinking to yourself Yes at these peevish, post-pandemic musings, then Entre-Temps (Meanwhile) by Raymond Depardon might be for you.
Not because it lacks people, but because the people come across like octopuses in a film documentary about octopuses; solitary: eating alone or poured upon singly by a ray of sun or in pairs or (less often) trios. They seem to swim through the daylight air — perfectly reasonable amounts of people: enjoying solo meals, small in-the-know conversations, public naps on public benches, biographies of Rimbaud — another solitary figure and sometimes pair, but never mob, “I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” Rimbaud whispers among his exclamations in A Season in Hell. An apt quote for this book, though the words here are no words, they’re Depardon’s images. Depardon searching in Paris, a vast city of people, for a kingdom of the enclosed.
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There are exceptions: the packed together dead, crowded beneath gravestones. The living pouring up from the metros on escalators or flooding along the sidewalks, their bodies like blood cells in the arteries of a metropolis. But this is always background, always far off, out of focus, as are our minds in such commutes; vegetal, automatic as the various conveyors that deliver us to our solitudes of work, duos, trios, cigarettes, nights.
There are two senses in these images that insinuate themselves to me; sense A: a photographer stepped in the photographic history of Europe (a beautiful woman crosses the street, surrounded by men barely aware of her evokes Ruth Orkin’s An American Girl in Italy by stark contrast…). Sense B: the lone, sentinel figure perceiving in themselves the lone wolf and small packs of others (a public park vivisected into little packs of one, two and three — hermetic experiences of a common ground).
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I could overcrowd this review. I could pack in thoughts for one to think (is there anything worse than catching some parroting thoughts, passing them off as deep personal insights?), should they pick this book up; but I’ve no glee at the sound of myself. I’m not a professor or TikTok photobook influencer, feeding one all the right words to express their excitement to others — not a joiner. I’m a wolf. An Octopus. Rimbaud transfigured upon Rimbaud. I say only, I opened this book and there I saw myself.
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