Stéphane Duroy spent nearly two years in the late 1980s photographing west African immigrants in Paris, in particular in the Îlot Chalon, a district behind the Gare de Lyon that had been home to different waves of arrivals in the city – Italian, Chinese, Moroccan – for two centuries. His series Harlem-sur-Seine – the title an ironic reference to the progressive jazz-age integration of the 1920s – won him a World Press Photographer award.
Revisiting that series now, in a new book of Duroy’s pictures, is to be cast into a place of extreme dereliction. From the early 1980s, when the Îlot Chalon had become notorious as the centre of the heroin trade in the city, the Parisian authorities had partly demolished the housing in the area, in an effort to make it unliveable, and prepare for urban renewal that involved a number of chain hotels and an extension of the station. Two drug-related murders in 1984 were used as the pretext to accelerate this policy. A New York Times report from that year suggested that the area, deliberately abandoned by the authorities, was home to 6,000 squatters, most of them Senegalese, who “coexisted with gangs and drug dealers”.
Duroy’s pictures got inside those precarious lives to suggest a whole language of desperation and survival. Children look out from bare rooms at bulldozers; washing is strung from windows of condemned blocks; men pound punchbags in improvised gyms; the cafes and the boucheries and the boulangeries are all boarded up. Sometimes, as in this picture, it is surreal detail that tells that story: the women’s improvised shower caps may protect them from Parisian rain, but the sodden phone book and the resignation in those eyes appear to render that day’s mission once again redundant.
Stéphane Duroy: Photo Poche is published by Editions Actes Sud (€14.50); a retrospective of Duroy’s work is at Galerie Vu, Paris until 23 February
