Looking back down Vilin street

It was like a village within a city, in Ménilmontant, a popular district of northern Paris. Listed for conservation in 1863, the street was declared insalubrious a hundred years later and has now been demolished.A street where Georges Perec, author of “La Vie, mode d’emploi” (“Life, instructions for use”) lived as a child, and to which he returned once a year, from 1969 to 1975, for a book he was writing on the fate of twelve parts of Paris to which he was deeply attached. It comprises some 500 photographs taken by great photographers and texts written by Perec in the 1970s.The commentary and the texts, read in the first person, blend naturally with the image, the defiant image that says no to the disappearing act of urban modernization.