Paris Buzz is the eighth installment in The Buzz Project's ongoing photo-documentary series.
It was shot in Paris, France, in 2017 from the windows of public buses.
In a time of increasing global turmoil, with shockwaves emanating from Great Britain, Europe, and America, we have decided to explore Paris – a city in transition, but also a city under immense pressure from socio-political, socio-economic, and socio-cultural strife. To catch the mood of the streets at this time, the real city behind the myth, we have adopted our modus operandi and traveled through the immense warp and weft of Paris by bus.
Paris, Le Grand, the "hypertrophic city," is a megacity of roughly 12 million people, the largest metropolitan area in the European Union. Highly diverse and genuinely global, it is considered by many "the world hub of the future."
Paris Buzz is also a censored vision – a documentary record digitally manipulated to creatively comply with Article 9 of the French Civil Code, which states: "Everyone has the right to respect for his private life ..." By designing a series of graphic masks made out of the serialized repetition of the number nine and applying this "mask" as a means of concealing the identity of all portrayed subjects, Paris Buzz engages directly with what is to artists an onerous task; that of insuring anonymity for people "caught in the act of" street photography.
As artists, we believe that in an era such as ours, with the mass digitalization of everything well underway, the issue of privacy rights is indeed essential. Yet we also believe that questions related to time-honored documentary arts that are conducted at large, in cities, should be properly addressed by and through the law, versus weakly defined so as to require adjudication of each instance, in order to re-establish the balance between rights – artist rights and rights of citizens.
Paris Buzz aims to suggest by the mere fact of its existence the importance of a legislative reconsideration of Article 9 in order to adequate its contents to the democratic standards of our times.
The Buzz Project series is currently composed of eight city installments (Brooklyn, NY; Milano, Italy; São Paulo, Brazil; Mumbai, India; Istanbul, Turkey; Mexico City, Mexico; Havana, Cuba) and three photographic books (Brooklyn Buzz, Damiani Editore, 2012; Milano Buzz, Damiani Editore, 2014; Havana Buzz, Damiani Editore, 2017).
