Défense D'afficher - Patricio Rodríguez

This book is the result of a wish and a city. The wish of the author, thought out at length, of taking photographs with the aim of leaving a testimony of the life passing in the streets at the time he has chanced to live; and the city, mythical, Paris, in which the fragility and the contradictions of the human being become its main protagonists.

In different periods, especially from September 2001 till January 2004, Patricio Rodríguez (Ponferrada, Spain, 1972; co-author of the photobook Prestige 42º15’N-12º08’W) lived in the region of Paris. Through his visual and written diaries he revises the daily experiences that marked him the most. They are the first years of a new and convulsive century in which all the social values that were believed to be guaranteed are somehow questioned. Perhaps in no other city the echoes of the pains of the world resound with such intensity and clarity as in the streets of Paris.

The book is divided into four chapters of images, connected by the reflections and impressions collected in the texts. The first three chapters represent the principal values on which the French republic rests (liberty, equality and fraternity), already transformed in foundations of any state under the rule of law. The fourth chapter includes a concept in debtor of the other three, which today more than ever is in the permanent centre of debate about the construction of any free and democratic society: identity.