Jean Bizien - New York Années 50

72 pages
Text(s) by Jean Bizien
Photograph(s) by Jean Bizien
30.5 x 20.5 cm
Language: French
Hardback
Publisher: Filigranes Éditions
2019

"Jean Bizien arrived in the United States in 1946. A very young man. He discovered the country through one city: New York. A city made up of hundreds of other cities, thousands of villages in Ireland, Italy, Russia, China, Mali, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil... Thousands of villages, millions of people, thousands of different habits, thousands of festivals, languages, hundreds of skin colors, millions of steps, a single language to speak together. One city to live in together. New York is a miracle. Millions of very different people rubbing shoulders, living and trading in peace. New York is a dark and joyous miracle. Peace and human justice are very relative. To be able to live together, let's invent something else? A taller, more vertical city. And yet the human beings photographed by Jean Bizien are villagers in a city of immense buildings. Jean Bizien has captured the dance of all these people living side by side in the city. They're villagers. They take their time, tuck their newspapers under their bums and watch life move on. They play checkers, covered in big woolly overcoats. In the afternoons, they sleep in the street to rest. Sometimes out of misery. New York is familiar, hard and soft. It becomes a Mediterranean city. A cold, snowy city. A city of pleasure and celebration. A city of children, whether adults or real children. A city of lonely men, protecting themselves from tears with newspapers under their backs or hands clasped over their faces. Jean Bizien is there to capture all this humanity. His camera is like a bottle of wine that has imprisoned the flavors and bitterness, the images and impulses of an era. Not long ago, he opened the cork of time. Sixty years before, sixty years after. [...]" - Olivier Couqueberg