Promenade des berges de la Seine André Gorz 75007
Proche du musée d’Orsay et de la Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor
DATES
From 6th november
to 16th december
Visible 24/7
Collection de la Bibliothèque Historique de la ville de Paris
Paris 70
In 1970, prompted by the City of Paris, the Fnac organized a major photography competition.
For two months in the spring, thousands of amateur photographers roamed the city, capturing it as it was in 1970. The idea was to preserve an image, a memory, a trace of Paris at a time of great change.
Indeed, 1970 marked a turning point in the city's history, with the onset of large-scale "modernization" works that would profoundly reshape the urban landscape, and, by extension, the socio-economic profile of its population. A political will to document Paris’s transformations gave rise to this exceptional archive, created by these “commissioned witnesses”: the amateur photographers methodically crisscrossing the city.
For the competition, Paris was divided into 1,755 squares measuring 250 by 250 meters. Each of the 2,000+ participants was randomly assigned one square to photograph.
The collection assembled by the Fnac - later donated to the City of Paris -consists of the application files submitted by the amateur photographers, each file containing a selection of images chosen by the author and entered into the competition. In total, over 100,000 documents were gathered.
This exhibition presents a curated selection from that archive.