SLUMS FROM YESTERDAY AND TODAY

It has been sixty years that France seems powerless in front of the slums that proliferate in the suburbs of its big cities. On february 2014 the 12th in Bobigny, nearby Paris, one of them caught fire in the middle of the night, killing Mélissa, an eight years old girl, asleep in her parent’s cabin. In the fifty’s, those tragic events were widespread. The life in the slums has been documented by many photographers. Monique Hervo and Pierre Douzenel were two of those. Here is a face to face between images from yesterday and today. In half a century, very few thing have changed. Roma populations replaced Algerians, and we do not say “slums” anymore, but “camp”.