Kodak Portra 400
Mauvais Garçons
Paris, Marais — Île Saint-Louis, April 2023
April 2023. Gabriel agreed to shoot without really knowing what I was looking for. Neither did I. I just knew there was something in the way he occupied clothes, waited on his motorcycle without checking his phone, existed in public space as if the present belonged to him. I loaded the Nikon F-301 with Kodak Portra 400 and we went to the Marais.
Portra 400 has a particular warmth on skin tones and beiges. It's the portraitist's film, for those who work with natural light rather than against it. Under the April sun in the Marais, the Haussmann facades turned ochre and Gabriel's coat dissolved into the setting. That was exactly it: someone who merges with a place.
Rue des Mauvais Garçons is a real street. A short dead-end in the 4th arrondissement, between Rue du Roi de Sicile and Rue de la Verrerie. A few meters of cobblestones, a wooden porch, walls that listen. Gabriel parked the Astor and we waited for the light to do its work. We waited a lot in this series. The title came on its own.
The narrative structure only became clear after the prints dried. Each image moved toward something: the wait at the porch, reading at Place des Vosges, the suspension on Île Saint-Louis, the machine alone on the quay, the blurred silhouette on the bridge, and finally the direct gaze. Six frames telling a story of a meeting we could have missed.
What stays with me from that day is the idea that a series can have dramatic arc without being staged. Gabriel didn't perform: he was there, waiting, looking. The Portra captured something real, even if that real was slightly costumed. That's the line I try to hold in every series: between document and fiction, between the instant and the pose.