Les amies de Place Blanche by Christer Strömholm – review

Over three days in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris , in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that whi... See more

ne of those would be the overlapping Parisian milieu that each occupied, frequently bumping shoulders at salons at which one could find such members of the cultural elite as Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola and the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. Manet/Degas also shows how the two men would be among the few artists to remain and defend Paris during the

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Madame Lapierre came from an upper-class, highly educated family. For her entire life she had lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to Passy, and I struggled to picture Father in those spaces. I imagined him sitting on the edge of a leather couch, or always staring out of a window, wanting to be elsewhere. I was relieved he wasn’t from Paris

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Paris, délimité d’un côté par l’Arc de Triomphe et de l’autre par la place de la Concorde. La rue Saint-Denis avec ses voyous et ses putes, proposant ouvertement aux passants leurs marchandises et leurs corps, artère morte le jour mais vibrante de sexe et de danger, de désir et de violence quand le soleil se couche. Montparnasse plein d’intellectue

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