parinoir

Nicolas Silatsa
parinoir

Photographs: Nicolas Silatsa

Text: A. Melon-Degras & Jean Claude Pomonti

Publisher: Self published

144 pages

Pictures: 116

Year: 1981

ISBN: 2-903683-00-X

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 28,5 x 22 cm, b&w photographs. layout by Nicolas Silatsa. Binding is fragile otherwise In good condition. Extremely rare!

In this book, Nicolas Silatsa “has taken Paris as his point of contact and the Blacks who find themselves physically displaced in this environment as his protagonists.” J.C Pomonti.

"A gallery of portraits and scenes, a gallery of immigrants who don't all have the same reasons for being here - but the images speak for themselves, and the photographer doesn't need to say or keep anything quiet - who have only skin color in common, which (goodbye negritude) neither unites nor opposes them in itself. A gallery of occupations: situations that run the gamut of the social ladder: there are ministers and presidents, there are sweepers and gasmen, nigger cops, nigger teachers and lawyers; there are those who toil or cheat in the metro; there's the star and the sportsman, the whore and the acrobat, the mixed couple and the marabout, the negrophile and the negroph, there's the writer in search of worldliness or debate and the student, Africa and the West Indies are swarming in Paris, carrying with them their myths, their illusions, their inequalities, their resourcefulness. Police harassment and graffiti - contradictory by the way - remind them of the price of exile. Alfred MELON-DEGRAS

"We are all half-breeds of someone.
We are also today or tomorrow
IMMIGRANTS" OR
OR "NOMADS".
It is love between peoples
Freedom, equality or fraternity?
I would not like to interfere in the internal problems
of the host country,
I do not want to judge, nor criticize, nor
nor would I want to criticize,
I am only a WITNESS
A LIEUTENANT of justice, equality and brotherhood
fraternity between the people.
Photography is a means of information
and everyone can read a
PICTURE.
I leave it to the readers to judge,
I would also like this TESTIMONY to serve as a warning
I would also like this testimony to serve as a warning to all those for whom
for whom PARIS is still a dream.

* From Biology to Culture.

J. RUFFIE, 1978.

Photography is a tam-tam

Photography is a language, a pedagogy, an art
as the Tam-Tam is a language, a messenger, an art.
Listen to
Listen to the tam-tam
From so far, so far away
Of the high voices of your ancestors
Listen to the tam-tam
The symbol of the Black People.
This color that is life
This color which is heat
This color that is light
This innocent color that is victim...

July 1980