Ola Rindal - Paris

Book excerpt: Made in his adopted home town, Paris is a continuation of Ola Rindal's fascination with the blind spots of the urban environment, the things that are always there but tend to escape our gaze. His is a not a subjectively imagined Paris. It is a Paris that exists in the real world, albeit at the edge of our field of vision. Vaguely familiar but not immediately recognizable, the side of Paris that come into view here is its non-places. We may encounter these blank or blind spots in any big city. Casually and fleetingly noticing their presence we seldom pay them very much attention. In Paris, Rindal turns his camera at these spots to get a grasp of what goes on there. What he captures is the daily struggle for survival waged by the city's poor and fallen - the human collateral chewed up and spat out by the big city machine. Paris is not a social realist depiction of street life, however. Like Eug�ne Atget, the legendary late 19th-century photographer of Paris, Rindal approaches his subject in a way that perhaps best is described as forensic. His gaze is naturally drawn to the things, buildings and people that suggest a different physiognomy of Paris than the one we have become accustomed to. Homing in on cracks and fissures in his surroundings his depiction hints at the presence of violent forces beneath the city's civilized surface.