The Life of the Blocs

About the exhibition

Life in the urban peripheries around the capital of Paris, the so-called banlieues, is his world. Born in 1978 in Créteil - one of these banlieues - Jean-Michel Landon moves first as a youth, later as a street worker and today as a photographer in a slalom between the different quarters of the city. In the tradition of humanist photography, his reportage "The Life of the Blocs" tells of the lives of people in the shadow of the large tower blocks: unvarnished and unfiltered, but always with the respect and empathy of an insider. Landon focuses in particular on the children and a forgotten youth, whom he portrays with a sensitive eye and for whom he not infrequently becomes a "big brother".

In his photographs, Jean-Michel Landon overcomes the often-negative clichés about life in the banlieues by showing its pluralism. Moments of light-heartedness, joie de vivre and solidarity are juxtaposed with the dreariness of everyday life and the lack of perspective. "The Life of the Blocs" is both a tribute and a photographic monument to a world whose true essence is often misunderstood and whose architectural traces are undergoing major changes in the wake of state urban renewal projects.