[The Guardian] The big picture: desperate lives in Stéphane Duroy’s 1980s Paris

The big picture: desperate lives in Stéphane Duroy’s 1980s Paris

The French photographer’s shot of Senegalese immigrants making a phone call is ​f​rom his series capturing the trials of everyday existence in a derelict area

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”.

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

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