Paris 1940-1944,
The Routine under Siege
May 1940. Two-thirds of the population of the city of Paris, which up to that point had been spared by the fighting, had evacuated from the city. Most of those who fled returned after June, and other than a few bombings, Paris was sheltered from large-scale destruction until the end of the war.
But Paris was also denied its role as France's eternal capital for the four years that it served instead as the German capital of France under the reign of an occupying government and collaborators who brazenly paraded through the streets. The city was essentially reduced to the status of a provincial quasi-prefecture, its bureaucracy virtually cut off from the authorities in Vichy for part of the time. In fact, only half of the French government maintained a presence in Paris.
As a result, the urban landscape was profoundly changed, and the daily lives of every single resident were affected by plundering, persecution, and periodic crackdowns as well as cold and hunger, both due to the ongoing war and the secondary struggles that grew out of it. These upheavals were not all equally visible, however, either in public or in the daily life of the city.
This exhibit has involved re-creating the very subjects that could not be portrayed during the Occupation. This has above all meant avoiding images that were often created specifically to suggest that life was continuing just as before--that Paris was still Paris. This has required learning to interpret the photographic record of the period. Re-examining well-known images and "rebel images" and seeing certain never-before-seen documents should help viewers understand how confusing daily life was during these exceptional times, and how seeming continuities can conceal radically new practices in a way that subverts or surpasses the routine and the mundane.
