République

With République, photographer Bérangère Fromont captures youth and resilience at Place de la République in Paris. She shines a light on a generation navigating the intersection of history, politics, and everyday life; and illustrates the duality of a place marked by revolts and protests, but also by calm and passive resistance. 

Beyond the marches, speeches, and other forms of direct resistance, the artist observes a different way of inhabiting the square. Skateboarders, in particular, embody a more diffuse form of resistance. By claiming urban space as their own and repurposing its elements, they give it a new face, slip into the cracks, and invent new ways to use it.

Bérangère Fromont offers a visual reflection on the many ways of being in the world. She explores the body’s presence in space, light, and the individual’s relationship to their environment. Place de la République emerges as a fragmented portrait of a city navigating between rebellion and peace.

For this series, Bérangère Fromont immersed herself in the square. Using an 80-mm medium-format film camera without a zoom lens forced her to take her shots from the center of her subject. From spring to fall, almost every day, she took a vast number of wide-angle photographs. The prints on display are actually details from these photographs, selected from the negatives, digitized in very high definition to allow for significant enlargement, and then retouched. They are printed on washi paper (Japanese paper made from mulberry fibers, which is very thin yet extremely durable) using the piezography technique—a carbon-ink printing process that produces high-quality shades of gray.