This concentration on banality also calls into question the photographer’s activity when working with such commonplace material. Why not just take the images from Google Street View? Good question, but I don’t want to work with appropriated imagery here. For me, direct vision and the identification of banality is itself delicate, subjective and inextricably linked to one’s view of a place.
This has been the most difficult project I’ve ever undertaken precisely because this is a subject without qualities - simultaneously neutral, intangible and thoroughly subjective in its identification. And, perhaps surprisingly, it is not so easy as one might think to find banal scenes. Most streets have something manifestly distinctive about them: an unusual architectural feature, juxtaposition of roof lines, a remarkable graffito, an off-kilter branch on a tree. Oddly, it is easier to find banality in Paris than in New York if only because Paris' homogeneity of scale and style alter the way one reads the street. New York in some locations is simply too dramatic, in others too distinctive, and in others so marked with social references that these risk taking over the photograph. In Paris these issues are minimized, particularly in the (mostly formerly) working class quarters in the Eastern zones. I may extend this investigation to New York, but at a later time.
One note: I use the French "Rues banales parisiennes" not only because the streets are in Paris but because the French “banal” is shaded differently than its English cognate. While the French “banal" carries all the meanings of the English (trite, conventional, commonplace, humdrum), the French simultaneously retains much of its reference to its original meaning of “common to all", and is therefore less charged and less pejorative. For instance, the term “banalisation” signifies only that something is in common use (the “banalisation” of the Internet means non-judgmentally that everyone is on it, not that it is especially trite). “Unremarkable Paris Streets” in minimizing the pejorative shading seems to me a better translation than “Banal Paris Streets”. For anglophones, I hope it will be understood as such.
All images are inkjet printed on 13" x 19" sheets.