One evening of this summer’s stifling, as we regagnions the parisian home of Gérald Bloncourt after a picnic at night in a garden-kitchen garden of the 11th arrondissement, we passed in front of the gates of a small square in which were grouped all the Black youth. Weakened by the disease, our friend was resigned to a wheelchair.
one after The other, the young people advanced towards him to shake her hand with infinite respect in him, murmuring in a smile, ” kapon “. Kapon ? What a strange word ? Isabelle, the wife of Gérald Bloncourt, gave us the key. “Small, these youths sowed the bazaar in the district, and Gerald the sermonnait in treating kapon, that is to say, shit in creole, when they ran away. They remember it well : it was the only one to speak to them. “
Gérald Bloncourt died Monday, October 29, at the age of 91, in this same paris home. It was mostly that, a humanist before being a photographer franco-haitian engineering, a talented painter and an inspired poet. Begun in 1948, in the journal Humanity, and then as an independent, his career as a reporter led him to survey the plants and the streets of Paris after the war. A Paris popular and proletarian, which he felt close. Among thousands of others, these clichés have been gathered in The Paris of Gérald Bloncourt (ed Parimagine, 2012), Look committed. Journey of a maverick out of the picture (ed François Bourin, 2004) or even The Proletarians (ed in The name of the memory, Bezons, 2004).
The slums of paris
Then one day, while photographing the construction of the Montparnasse tower at the end of the 1960s, he met workers Portuguese. He would never leave. He then discovers the slums of paris, where they live miserably, the steps on the roads of emigration from Portugal, taking with them the trains that pass by the…
