The big picture: Dolorès Marat’s Paris, city of intrigue

The French photographer’s painterly portrait of a woman in a metro station hints at the unknowableness of everyday urban life

The French photographer Dolorès Marat took this picture in the Étoile station of the Paris metro, near the Arc de Triomphe. Marat was on her way to see her doctor when she passed the woman with the gloves on the down escalator. The picture is typical of Marat’s work, which captures dream-like moments in the everyday life of the city, painterly scenes that always seem to carry an atmosphere of unspecified significance. You are invited to create a little narrative around the descending Parisian woman, passing the swimming-pool tiles of the wall’s surface, adrift in a story of her own. Marat talks of the ways in which her photographs “come from the gut”, and memorialise instants when she instinctively feels “the pulse of [a scene] the blood flowing through its veins”.

A survey of Marat’s career is collected in a new exhibition and a book, which was the recipient of last year’s Robert Delpire book prize. Her camera haunts zoos and evening streets, and finds related elements of strangeness. The beautiful, disturbed surfaces of her work, in which colours dance and bleed into each other, add to this effect; many of her pictures appear lit by lantern, both edgily modern and cast into a timeless dimension. This atmosphere is not accidental. Marat has always made her prints using the Fresson process, a carbon-based technique developed at the end of the 19th century, and still a closely guarded secret by the Fresson family, which makes a tiny number of prints in its Paris atélier each year.

Dolorès Marat is at Fondazione Sozzani, Paris from 31 October to 24 November. The book is published by Delpire & Co (€49)

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The big picture: Dolorès Marat’s Paris, city of intrigue

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