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A Tale of Two Cities

Like every large metropolis, there is an outside and underground life. Two different cities that are both open and hidden: it’s on this world that I focused my camera for 6 months.

The subway is a second world – hidden, dark and dirty – where people spend a non-negligible time of their day regarding their location in Paris or its suburbs. They meet for one stop or the whole subway line depending on their journey. This is one of the rare places in a city where people can sit closely for an instant, and take the time to look around them – if they aren’t on their smartphones.

Students, workers, tourists or the homeless, the train packs this little world into boxes. It shows the plurality and the diversity of the city in one unique place.

The first thing I do when I sit on the train is to look around all the people that surround me and “collect” in my mind all the faces I see. This is an infinite spectacle of life, where you guess who is who, who does what, what is the relationship between those people you see.

Are they parents, lovers or just friends or co-workers? The imagination can let you interpret all these things, but of course your conclusion remains subjective. This is a moment where you can really look into the eyes of strangers, speculate about their life, imagine the before and after this moment.

Some of them are asleep, other read, chat or daydream. When someone looks interesting from my point of view, I try to capture this moment without being noticed, and add it to my underground bestiary.

This series of black and white film photography show a period of Paris between 2014 and 2015, when I used to take the train daily for school, work or just to hang out in Paris. I captured these moments with a Yashica FX-D, a Minolta XG-1 and rolls of Kodak T-Max.

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December 18, 2017 Vincent Pflieger Filed Under: Blog, Guest Post

Vincent Pflieger

I am a 27 year old film photographer born and raised in Paris, where I lived for 25 years. I moved to New York two and a half years ago to study media analysis at NYIT, and am now working as a food photographer in a food design company. Since I’m shooting in NYC, I have had the chance to show my work with magazines like Vice, Fubiz or iGnant. My passion for photography started when my dad gave me his old camera, a Yashica FX-D he used when he was a kid. It was actually the same camera that captured my first steps when I was a child. I just tried this antiquity for fun, and actually liked it. I did not discover my aptitude and passion for photography until I tried a film camera. Then, I started to shoot naturally in the streets of Paris, while walking to the school or to work, to a store or a café. I used to shoot both black & white (especially in Paris) and colors, but step-by-step, I preferred to shoot only in colors. Photographers that influenced me the most, especially in NY, are Richard Sandler, Bruce Davidson, and of course, Vivian Maier.

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