Dan Boulton’s new book Paris Youth was shot between 2020 and 2022, but its release amid widespread protests across France this summer feels timely. Featuring a series of stripped-back, no-frills photographs in which his subjects gaze straight into his lens, it documents the young people who reside in the French capital’s various arrondissements at a pivotal moment in their lives – and indeed, the country’s future.
Paris Youth was inspired by Mathieu Kassovitz’s cult 1995 film La Haine, which follows three young men over a frenetic 24 hours as they are left reeling after their friend, Abdel Ichaha, is brutally injured in police custody. Its opening scenes, which allude to urban riots ignited by the assault, chillingly mirror the uproar seen across France this week, sparked by the tragic death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old who was shot dead by the police during a traffic stop in suburb of Nanterre. Over 28 years after the film’s release and 18 years after a similar event in 2005 – when the deaths of two teenage boys hiding from police set off weeks of rioting – La Haine’s themes of youthful fury in the face of police brutality still feel as relevant as ever.
“Protests are part of the fabric of Paris life,” Dan says in an interview held a week before the current unrest in France. “You’ll have these big demonstrations and these really scary police lining all the main streets with their riot shields and guns. I look at it and I’m like, ‘Jesus, you’ve got balls protesting when there’s all of this, and they’re going to drag you across the ground’. It comes from a passion to express themselves.” In a poetic foreword to Paris Youth, fellow photographer and artist Nick Waplington writes beautifully about the bravery of the city’s young people, prefacing his thoughts with the saying La beauté est dans la rue, or “Beauty is in the street” in English. It’s a well known slogan in France which was first scrawled on a protest placard in Paris back in 1968.
Paris Youth, however, isn’t directly about protests. Were it not for the glimpse of a European plug socket or metro railing in the background of Dan’s portraits, you’d even be forgiven for not immediately knowing it was shot in the city. Rather, the project hones in on the young individuals the photographer met over the course of the two years following the arrival of Covid, capturing them on the city’s streets and in their apartments, in all their raw vulnerability and strength. “I’m just genuinely just really interested in people,” Dan says. His own youth in a tower block in north London was spent caring for his terminally ill mum, escaping to skate parks and making zines using his dad’s prized Pentax camera when he could. “It was a difficult time for me at that age, so I love seeing how they’re formulating their lives and finding their way.”
A follow up to Dan’s 2016 book No Turning Back, a heartfelt documentation of skaters on London’s Southbank shot over ten years, Paris Youth reveals a fascination with the ways young people are pushing the future forward. Beyond La Haine, the photographer cites a fascination with an array of disruptive seminal youth culture works and movements: Larry Clark’s Kids, Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves, 80s punks and Kurt Cobain. “I think a lot of people try to hide their influences,” he says. “I think it’s important to be open and be like, ‘Yeah, of course I’m influenced by Larry Clark, who the fuck wouldn’t be?’ The punks, and that 80s hardcore scene as well… I love that kind of expression. With the kids in Paris Youth, a lot of them have their own projects, like up-cycling clothes, making music or DJing. There’s a real DIY culture and disdain against anything that looks remotely corporate, which I just find fantastic.”
During various trips to the city, sometimes teaming up with casting director Esther Boiteux or organically meeting local kids in places like République square — the heart of many protests in Paris — Dan began to realise many of his subjects knew each other or were connected in some way. “I photographed a boy who told me afterwards that I had shot his sister a few weeks before,” he says. “And there were people that I would never have thought would know each other. You’ve got one kid that’s a skateboarder that knows this other kid who’s a bit more into heavy metal. So that’s interesting as well. I do think we are living in a time where connections are much stronger, possibly because of COVID – a time where these kids, when they were quite young, will have realised just how important connections are. I had this genuine sense that people wanted to be seen, and I just wanted to allow these kids the space to be themselves.”
While Dan didn’t set out to make a project about the Coronavirus years, he came to see the effect these immensely turbulent times — lockdowns, economic uncertainty and political unrest — have had on the young people Paris Youth documents. The resulting book is an ode to their resilience and optimism in the face of adversity. “I just feel like they question absolutely everything now,” he says. “I think these kids are aware of huge things. There’s a willingness to get out on the streets and fight for what they believe in.”
‘Paris Youth’ by Dan Boulton is published by Chinagraph Books. It launches with an exhibition at Photobook Cafe, London on 6 July 2023.
Credits
Images courtesy of Dan Boulton