beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

This book presents, for the first time in France, the work of a leading theorist of mobility: Tim Cresswell. His theories are juxtaposed with Mikaël Lemarchand’s intimate knowledge of Eurostar’s operations and illuminated by the humanist perspective of photographer Géraldine Lay.

The authors reveal how the European Union, the Schengen Area, and the commercial policies of transport operators shape different experiences of movement through the example of two of Europe’s major mobility hubs: Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and the Eurostar area within Paris’s Gare du Nord station.

Invited to immerse herself in these two emblematic spaces of mobility, photographer Géraldine Lay contributed, through her work, to the analysis of the spaces and the movements of the people who use them. She captures passersby and commuters like actors performing in scenes unfolding before our eyes, the transit spaces becoming veritable theatrical sets. But nothing is staged; only the photographer’s framing gives them meaning. Her gaze allows us to order and prioritize what, caught up in the flow of daily movements, never appears to us. When working in public spaces, the photographer confides: “I cherish these moments when everything seems posed, set up like on a film set where, as Jean-Luc Godard said, you have to ‘try to find in all these crowd movements the starting point of the fiction.'”

Reduce