#046 - I hate smiling
August 14, 2015 3:16 AM   Subscribe

365 Parisians by fellow Parisian (born in Kazakhstan, raised in Spain) photographer Constantin Mashinskiy: I decided to take one street portrait, every day, of a random Parisian stranger until I had reached 365 pictures, and met 365 people. Mashinskiy at work in the streets of Paris and short interview.
posted by elgilito (20 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
The humanity. Remarkable. Fellow sojourners.
posted by WinstonJulia at 3:59 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Brilliant work!
posted by Drexen at 4:40 AM on August 14, 2015


It reminds me that the world is full of billions and billions of fascinating and wonderful people and I want to meet them all.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:44 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Fascinating! Very few smiles, although I can detect amusement in the eyes of many. (The blues singer is happy!)
posted by sutt at 5:43 AM on August 14, 2015


These are really interesting portraits. I really like its...everyday-ness..."Quotidien." Ah, yes, very quotidian.

Yes, so that's what I like about these portraits.

DAY 144

He told me that the restaurant was closed


I detected a Gallic shrug there that can't be adequately conveyed through the medium of still photography.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:57 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


These are magnificent. Often the subject's clothing sets off their face - I wonder if he noticed that in evaluating potential subjects, or if all Parisians really do wear black.
posted by missmary6 at 8:09 AM on August 14, 2015


I was surprised to see Phil Lynott in there on Day 210. Good luck with the busted bike, and of course, the reanimation.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:41 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


And ^^^there's^^^ my 2,000th comment on Metafilter.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:42 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


#351 — Once he met a woman, and since then he draws her portrait everyday

SOBBING, THANKS
posted by psoas at 8:59 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was surprised to see Phil Lynott in there on Day 210. Good luck with the busted bike, and of course, the reanimation.

I was going to go with Kurt Vonnegut there, but you might be right.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:22 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


I wonder if he noticed that in evaluating potential subjects, or if all Parisians really do wear black.

The vast majority of them do, yes. Winter is a sea of long coats in black, black, black, grey, black, charcoal, black, black, brown, black, HOLY CRAP RED, black, black...
posted by MarionnetteFilleDeChaussette at 10:51 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


So many people reading BOOKS! What century are they living in??
posted by biddeford at 10:53 AM on August 14, 2015


So many people reading BOOKS! What century are they living in??

Paris

also it costs less to replace a paperback than an e-reader or phone taken from your hands by a grabber.
posted by MarionnetteFilleDeChaussette at 10:59 AM on August 14, 2015


Gorgeous images, spectacular images, and great subjects -- Paris so much more than its museums and landmarks, Paris is Parisians. Mashinskiy has given us a wonderful view of them, I feel I just spent 75 minutes very candidly watching Parisians coming to the edge of smiling. A pleasure.

Five straight-up smiles. Out of 365 images, 365 people -- only five out of 365 smiling broadly, showing teeth. Actually I think one other person is showing teeth but it's sortof a half-assed grin, not a broad smile. This is a choice. Many others are headed toward smiling -- at least 75 show merriment -- but only five times did he drop the hammer when the person was smiling broadly. Consciously or not, he gave us serious expressions on his subjects faces, and more serious the deeper he headed into the year, less smiles, or even hints of smiles as the project unrolled. That's not good nor bad, just a clear choice.

Or so it seems to me.
~~~~~

A wonderful quote from the interview:
Why did you decide to make all the portraits in black & white?
As Ted Grant once said: “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls”. I don’t take this as a dogma, but it’s true that the face gains more attention than the background.

I've never heard nor read that before but I've damn sure felt it; this Ted Grant knows whereof he speaks.

~~~~~

I've only been once, 21 years ago, I went for five days and stayed for eighteen and did not want to leave when I did, I left deep claw marks on the concourse floor of the airport on the day I came back here, moaning. I left deep claw marks on my credit cards, too, but who cares -- not I. I may never get back. And the claw marks on my $$$ were not near as deep as those left from NYC, which is just totally insane. IMO;YMMV.

I loved Paris. The museums, of course, I hit as many of them as I could, a couple of them twice. But the people watching was great, also, as Mashinskiy showed us here. I made a friend there, we had some fun, I wanted to marry her or something but she was A Serious Catholic and way too young anyways but we sure had a time, went to a couple of museums together (THAT was just great; I knew artists she didn't, she knew artists that I didn't, we agreed exactly that when Kandinsky went to those geometric shapes it was a retreat, that he was scared shitless by the freedoms he was putting onto canvas and what's safer than circles and triangles or what-have-you, etc and etc), we went to a US movie together and for once the subtitles were in a goofy language, instead of the other way around. One afternoon we sat in a cafe, there was a poster on the wall for the movie Delicatessen, a movie I loved (and still love) and I gestured toward that poster, said "God, what a great flick." and her eyes went wide, she grabbed my arm, she said "You know Delicatessen? Oh!, you are a good American!" I will always, always love her for that.

I kept hoping I'd see her in these photos, but no luck. She was so lovely; brown eyes, brown hair, I'd say she was a funky dresser except she wasn't, not really, she was a smart Parisian woman, that's all, and Parisian women just know how to make it happen. It's what Machinskiy's camera just showed us, if we hadn't already known.

~~~~~

One of the things I loved most about Paris is a walk I took through the catacombs, maybe a third of a mile, maybe more, but enough, a long enough walk through these stacks of bones, chest deep (and I am six foot five inches tall) chest deep and going back at least twenty foot on either side as I walked that aisle. You want a sense of the impermanence of life? Catacombs. Cemeteries don't come near it, they just can't. You walk through racks of femurs and ribs and skulls and jawbones smiling your way, some of them with all of their teeth -- it affected me profoundly. This stack of bones, that pelvis there once delivered a child, and that person loved that child, deeply, with all their heart, and maybe the kid was a shitbird and didn't know how lucky they were but then finally they came round, and loved their Mother, and then that mother grew old and the child had to take on that role, and now both of them side by side. Love, hatred, greed, grief, illnesses -- all of it, to end up here.

I wrote about that because I could not help but see those Parisians living their lives as people will, and knowing where they're headed, too, same as you and I. But since I experienced that in Paris I somehow saw it more, esp with the black and white photography, which, as noted in that quote, really pulls the people into complete focus, it is the people that you see.

~~~~~

I do enjoy to go to cemeteries in West Texas, poor peoples cemeteries, the rocky earth mounded on the grave if it's a new grave, sunken down a foot if the grave is maybe two years or five, then leveled off after that, the sun and the heat and the wind doing a fast job on any markers, the fake plastic flowers faded to almost nothing. None of the rest of it is sad to me -- it's just what it is, life and death -- but the plastic flowers are grotesque, they are what makes me sad, they're so pathetic. Many of the stones -- when they have stones, rather than wood markers -- many of the stones have photographs affixed to them, photographs of the person whose bones lie there, and water gets to the photos and sun fades them and they also are pathetic.

I am probably a morose person. I don't think so, but it's been mentioned -- "Why can't you just watch Hollywood Squares? Look, here's some cake. Enough with the pathos, pal -- get a grip." I of course think I have a grip. Everyone's going on about "Hey, look, it's Phyllis Diller!" and I'm all like "Who gives a fuck? Plastic flowers! Faded photos! Etc!"

Plus it's not just cemeteries -- I love West Texas, its harsh beauties, its extremes. You want to see some faces, go to West Texas. Take water. Lots of water.

~~~~~

Friends of mine, a married couple, they moved to Paris two years ago. The wife is in town just now, with their 15 year old daughter; I ran into her twice, yesterday, so great to see her, we're going to do coffee/lunch on Tuesday. Ariane speaks five languages, and signs five languages also -- she's something else, born in Belgium, she has people in Belgium, France, Switzerland, and here stateside and who knows where else, given the gift of three languages by being born into the family she was born into but obv having an aptitude for it anyways. And to sign five languages -- it's really as though she is fluent in ten languages. She's a trip.

They are bouncing on the edges of a coin tossed into the air and now skittering/scattering as bouncing coins will: Do they stay in Paris or return to Austin? I want whatever it is that they want, but I sure do love to see them when they are in town. I mentor the husband, which is really fun -- Monday afternoons I'm sitting down on the dock here @ 3 PM, 10 PM in Paris, and Jason and I talk for an hour, give or take. It's pretty cool, costs next to nothing of course, and his voice as clear as if he was in the next room.

They have given their daughter a huge gift, one of the best gifts a child can be given: She was a South Austin kid, and South Austin has lots going for it but Paris, two years in Paris starting at 13 years old, now almost 16 -- she is now a citizen of the world. That girl can go anywhere now; once one new culture is captured, that experience can be replicated in just about any other.

Huge differences between the cultures, of course. Aside from the obvious -- Jason has had his troubles with people talking like dumbos, and expecting him to do the same, and having to learn metric everything, and very, very difficult to be a vegetarian, much less vegan, which is what they lived religiously here in ATX. There is no such thing as hopping in the car and going for a joy ride, which is what summer nights are made for here in Austin. Nor even a bike ride, really.

Why? Because nothing is open, that's why -- it's not like here, damn sure that's been their experience of it; there are no coffee shops filled with mopes covered in ink, gazing at their laptop screens and scratching themselves til four AM or five, and Austin is just packed with these kind of joints, teeming with them, pretty much, you can barely step out your door without walking into three or four of them. (Okay, so not really. But close.)

All of us are night birds, and all of us have friends that are night birds, and if some of them are busy and/or being normal for whatever reason, and sleeping like regular people, there are plenty of others who aren't, and we know their phone numbers, and where they hang out, too. None of that in Paris. Zero. Maybe for people with tons of money -- I mean, really, there's got to be a scene, right? But my friends haven't found it, and they miss those pieces of their life here.

Or maybe they're just homesick. That coin is tumbling...

~~~~~

I'd like to think I could make a go of it, esp with a high-speed internet connection and cheap cell minutes. There is so much beauty there, there is so much depth, there is so much Capital A Art there -- the whole place really, Paris *is* Capital A Art, seems to me -- I think I could make it a year without blinking, regardless I cannot speak French, regardless no hopping into the pickup and taking a spin, regardless metric this or that.

I ran into plenty of people who didn't like that I didn't speak French, and they let me know it, but I ran into plenty of others who didn't give a rats ass, not to mention that there are plenty of US citizens and Brits and others who know how to talk regular. Plus I don't mind listening to people speaking French*, it's pretty to my ear, I like listening to it at least as much as I enjoy listening to Mexican Spanish.
*It's nothing at all like listening to people speaking German, who sound like they're throwing up a dead, rotted cat they ate two days ago and it's full of big fishing hooks and barbed wire. Gawd. Germans are such great people, I love those that I've met, but then they speak in German to someone and I want to hide under the table, cowering like a dog in a bad thunderstorm.

So now after seeing all those great faces, in those great clothes, all those Parisian women, and all those great backdrops -- now I want to go back. And if my friend *do* come back, it'll be like mid-October, so I've got to move fast. I know that it's always overrun with tourists but I'd think that September maybe would be light, people going to school, gone back home from their Paris vacation. I couldn't stay with my friends -- their place is about the size of my shoe, yet another thing they were not prepared for -- but I'm not averse to cheap hotels and/or hostels or what-have-you. I stayed in dumpy hotels when I was there in 94 and I was like "Who cares, I'm just sleeping here." and though I'm 60 rather than 40, I'm a young 60, able to deal with a lumpy mattress if Paris is outside the door.

If I go, and take any photos of people in black and white, I'll ask them please to smile.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:49 PM on August 14, 2015 [6 favorites]


Beautiful photographs, interesting portraits of intriguing people (who are they? what are their stories?) I love the quiet gaze of many of the people portrayed. Such characters.

But good god, the cigarettes in so many of their hands. That's one thing I don't miss about Paris - the endless, relentless, in-your-face-because-I-can smoking. Perhaps I will return once everyone quits that nasty habit. I do miss the cafés, the good food, the neighborhoods, the architecture, and yes the museums too. And my friends. But the ambient smokers, who are *everywhere*, no I do not miss them at all.
posted by seawallrunner at 8:52 PM on August 14, 2015


#260 is Abe Lincoln.
posted by DieHipsterDie at 11:05 AM on August 15, 2015


So I really got to wondering about this Ted Grant that Machinskiy quoted in the interview about this project.

A quick search turned up Ted Grant's web site. Beautiful, beautiful photography. Really could make an FPP about his work.
posted by dancestoblue at 4:25 PM on August 15, 2015


If I go, and take any photos of people in black and white, I'll ask them please to smile.

You'll impose your own cultural norm on foreign strangers and expect to get good results?
posted by zadcat at 6:27 PM on August 15, 2015


That's one thing I don't miss about Paris - the endless, relentless, in-your-face-because-I-can smoking. Perhaps I will return once everyone quits that nasty habit.

Hah, I may go to Paris so I can start again. God, I miss smoking.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:18 PM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


If I go, and take any photos of people in black and white, I'll ask them please to smile.

You'll impose your own cultural norm on foreign strangers and expect to get good results?
posted by zadcat at 8:27 PM on August 15


You bet.
posted by dancestoblue at 6:15 PM on August 17, 2015


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