Clarisse Hahn, Princes de la Rue
A working-class neighborhood in Paris, its market, trafficking, and kebabs, bodies intersecting, sometimes presenting. Money flows at the rate of glances. Cigarette vendors reign beneath the metro overpass at Barbès. They are champions of observation; nothing escapes their notice. The series Princes of the Streets is part of Hahn’s work-in-progress Boyzone , a project analyzing moments in which men’s bodies choreograph their relationship to public and private space. Bodies and looks: Hahn’s film and photography on communities and rituals goes beyond the subject’s consenting to be viewed, showing how social beings make use of the gaze we turn towards them in order to express themselves: let yourself be seen without being had. Hahn is not an ethnographer, she’s an artist; she’s a documentary filmmaker as it’s the best-suited term, but her attitude bears no egotism: keeping close to each body, she disappears, leaving the body space to express its force, fragility, pain, and history. By including archival photos, Hahn creates a desynchronization that allows invisible genealogies to come forward. These young men are descendants of French heroes recruited during the colonial period. Whether irony or historical strategy, here, hero and antihero are one. Barbès, the Cour des Miracles, takes in both elderly and outsider, but the wounds of the marginalized are difficult to heal—memory scars just like flesh. Many cultures of the world harbor Boyzones . Expressing joy, incarcerated, devoted, in protest, surviving, or toiling, these men speak the language of their anatomy. A litany of versatile and blunt attitudes parade the streets as Hahn analyzes “men among themselves.” Her experience with documentary helps her deploy this invisible presence. Men looking are being looked at, the male body eroticized. The male gaze dissipates in the cold of the morning. Snow fell on Barbès last winter. It also fell on Algiers. Michel Poivert