Deliberately "Blurring Daily Life"
Reality through photographic clichés
Ever since the sixteenth century, the Cris de Paris and the smaller trades and occupations constituted a wealth of conventional, reassuring images that could be depended upon to express the timelessness and rootedness of people occupying urban spaces. These stereotypes drain reality from any transgressive power by representing the "little Parisian people" in a blandly reassuring version of the truth. The popular Parisian classes inspired engravings and paintings for centuries before naturally being reinterpreted by photography to accentuate the poetry of humanity. The photographs taken for the Vichy propaganda services or simply inspired by the Maréchal's values borrowed from this conventional, familiar repertoire to portray the eternal Paris of the humble working class, a world peopled by schoolchildren, the inevitable street-urchins on the staircases of Montmartre, and simple, modest people providing a debonair image of a city in which time has stood still. They are different from images that show Occupation soldiers "tourists unlike most." They helped to neutralize the march of history and at the same time to negate difficulties in daily life as well as the acts of resistance that they unleashed.
