Catherine Poncin, Du champ des hommes, territoires – Michèle Cohen Hadria, « Du champ des hommes »…

[Fall 2002]

This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

Abstract
Manifesting her propensity for memory, Catherine Poncin takes no photographs; instead, she draws from a corpus of urban and community archives to gather significant, often unperceived “layers.” In Bobigny, a Paris suburb, she proceeds to “pile up strata of clues,” revealing the town’s market-gardening activities, its memory of the Shoah, and its redevelopment into uniform neighbourhoods after the war. A reading by the sociologist-anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu throws light on certain prescriptions inherent to community photography. However, these prove to be absent in a population burdened by a hybrid urbanism, even in the search for an unanchored lived memory. . .