PARIS PERDU by Jörg Rubbert at Central European House of Photography in Bratislava

„PARIS PERDU” (‚LOST PARIS’): Pho­tographs from the Streets of Paris by Jörg Rub­bert

Street pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion PARIS PERDU by Berlin pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jörg Rub­bert is still at Cen­tral Euro­pean House of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Bratisla­va until May 27^th, 2023. Slo­va­kian TV has report­ed about the exhi­bi­tion, here’s the link to it (start­ing at 7′50″):

https://www.rtvs.sk/televizia/archiv/14142/403154#711

Take a con­tem­pla­tive stroll through the streets of Paris with the exhi­bi­tion „PARIS PERDU” (Lost Paris). Berlin-based pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jörg Rub­bert began his for­ay into cap­tur­ing scenes of every­day life in the 1980’s, when he shot series of ordi­nary peo­ple. Here he turns his cam­era on the streets of Paris and its cit­i­zens, cap­tur­ing how the city has changed from 1988 to 2019.

On his visu­al time trav­el through Paris, he observed dif­fer­ent facets of the metrop­o­lis: he took pic­tures by day and by night at dif­fer­ent loca­tions, social hot spots and bour­geois dis­tricts, enter­tain­ment dis­tricts and rep­re­sen­ta­tive squares. With empa­thy but often also with wist­ful­ness Rub­bert doc­u­ment­ed the change, what fas­ci­nates him about Paris and what defines the DNA of Paris for him: the unique char­ac­ter of this city, its lib­er­al­i­ty and cos­mopoli­tanism.

Rubbert’s pic­tures char­ac­ter­ize the city in two ways: on the one hand it takes an emphat­i­cal­ly nos­tal­gic look at Paris with its promi­nent build­ings and its pic­turesque atmos­phere; on the oth­er hand, it doc­u­ments every­day life and the cur­rent social sit­u­a­tion in the city – the for­got­ten Paris of the immi­grants from the Maghreb coun­tries and their asso­ci­at­ed eco­nom­ic and eth­nic exclu­sion. The ‚old’ meets a new, mul­ti­cul­tur­al Paris. A Paris with two faces so to speak …

Using imper­fect, tex­tur­al black and white film, each of Rubbert’s images has a peace­ful qui­et where you feel as if you can hear the subject’s thoughts. Nos­tal­gia is jux­ta­posed with the new mul­ti­cul­tur­al essence of Paris, with focus on dai­ly activ­i­ties like read­ing the paper, gath­er­ing with neigh­bors, or look­ing out over the Seine. What results is a ten­der, thought­ful love let­ter to Paris, its tran­si­tions and the peo­ple who have called it home.

‚PARIS PERDU’ (Lost Paris)

Open­ing: April 19^th 2023, 06:00 p.m.
Exhi­bi­tion from April 20^th to May 27^th
Open­ing hours: Tue to Sun from 01:00 p.m. to 06:00 p.m.

Cen­tral Euro­pean House of Pho­tog­ra­phy
Stre­doeuróp­sky dom fotografie (Sedf)
Pre­pošt­ská 4
P.O.BOX 290
814 99 Bratisla­va / Slo­va­kia
http://www.sedf.sk
phone: +421 918 619 077

Pho­to book: „Paris au cours du temps” © Jörg Rub­bert
Hard­cov­er, 208 pages, 160 b&w images, For­mat: 24,50 x 28,00 cm
Lan­guages: English/French/German
Pub­lished by Ket­tler-Ver­lag, Dort­mund, Ger­many

About the pho­tog­ra­ph­er

For Jörg Rub­bert, born 1963 in the small town of Bad Sege­berg (North­ern Ger­many), the urban liv­ing and the city as a devel­op­ing organ­ism are one of his main pho­to­graph­i­cal top­ics. His pic­tures were pre­sent­ed in numer­ous exhi­bi­tions and pub­li­ca­tions in con­tem­po­rary pho­tog­ra­phy – with focus on Paris, New York and America’s South­ern States. Rub­bert rep­re­sents the human­is­tic direc­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy which aims to focus on people’s social envi­ron­ment.

His pho­tographs were shown on exhi­bi­tions and pho­to-fes­ti­vals at home and abroad and fea­tured in numer­ous media, i.a. CNN, ZEIT, FAZ, WELT, Tagesspiegel, PHOTO Inter­na­tion­al, Pho­to Klas­sik, PHOTOGRAPHIE.

He lives and works as a free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er in Berlin, Ger­many.

Mak­ing of

Jörg Rubbert’s long-run­ning pho­to series was shot over a peri­od of more than 30 years, from 1988 to 2019. The ear­ly pho­tographs from 1988 to 1990 are the result of numer­ous vis­its to the city dur­ing his work as a sleep­ing car atten­dant on the night trains from Ham­burg or Han­nover to Paris. Lat­er vis­its to Paris com­prise short trips with his daugh­ter (2018) and a few one-week solo trips (2019), most­ly in autumn because of the spe­cial day­light at this time of the year.

Rubbert’s pho­tog­ra­phy belongs to the typ­i­cal ‚Street Pho­tog­ra­phy’ genre. For him the spe­cial atmos­phere of the city in gen­er­al and the sit­u­a­tion of its inhab­i­tants in par­tic­u­lar are the main sub­jects. To this day he takes ana­log pic­tures with­out any tech­ni­cal refine­ments, „unplugged” so to speak. He always relies on the exist­ing light­ing con­di­tions and uses only stan­dard lens­es for his pic­tures to allow the dis­played image sec­tion to appear as authen­tic as pos­si­ble. The style of the pho­tos is deter­mined by the con­di­tions under which they are tak­en, mak­ing them part­ly look like ‚failed pic­tures’: Rubbert’s images are imper­fect in a nat­ur­al sense, blurred and some­times even grainy, to make them look authen­tic and cre­ate an atmos­pher­ic den­si­ty. In the pro­duc­tion process of his full-size prints, he avoids any manip­u­la­tive inter­ven­tions. The fin­ished prints are there­fore no high-res­o­lu­tion images but atmos­pher­ic images – pic­turesque and rich in con­trast. 

The ana­log pho­tos shown in this exhi­bi­tion were tak­en with black-and-white 35-mm film by Kodak (T‑Max with 400 ASA). The 35-mm neg­a­tives were after­wards scanned in 300 dpi high-res­o­lu­tion by the lab­o­ra­to­ry Pix­el Grain, Berlin, and print­ed on sil­ver gelatin (bary­ta) pho­to paper.

The major­i­ty of the pho­tos were shot with a Nikon-F2 35-mm reflex cam­era. The lens­es used were a stan­dard lens Micro-Nikkor 1:3.5/55 mm as well as a zoom lens Nikkor 1:3.5/43–86 mm. Recent pic­tures (from 2019) were shot with a Minol­ta CLE viewfind­er cam­era with the Minol­ta-Rokkor 1:2.0/40 mm stan­dard lens.