Her first husband was a drunk and a bore, and she hasn’t married again since they divorced. She’s worked for seventeen years in the same bookstore. On her lunch break each day, she goes to the same café, orders the same ham and cheese baguette, and sits on a bench in a nearby square to read philosophy texts, bought with her staff discount, or, occasionally, smutty historical romance novels—whatever is in the sale section.
She is on this street today, walking briefly toward you, and then, for a while, in step with you, when you both veer left, because she is on her way to her daughter’s house, for the second of her twice-yearly visits. They have a strained relationship. The woman suddenly turns away from you to enter a Monoprix. She will search for a small token for the children: Not sweets—her daughter wouldn’t like that—but perhaps a ball, a plastic toy, or a cup with a picture of a giraffe.
Or perhaps it’s her husband she’s buying something for in Monoprix. Perhaps, in fact, she’s been married three times and all three of her marriages have been happy, up until some of the men’s untimely deaths. This marriage, to the man she is walking to meet now, falling for a while in step with you, is one built on wholesome, shared routines: on roasting tomatoes together each morning to eat with toast, on visiting elegant gardens within a two-hour drive from the center of Paris, on reading together in silence, on the blue sofa at home for an hour each evening. She jokes to her friends that surely the Lord will be kind enough to make this marriage the last one. Surely, one of her loves can finally outlive her, she says. She’s had terrible luck, her friends tell their other friends.
Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe she’s a poet. Maybe a high-court judge. Maybe she is a nurse: someone who holds people’s hands when they die. Maybe she, too, invents characters for the strangers she meets, backstories for her patients, a whole web of family histories to explain the tiniest of impressions and details: the origins of a charm bracelet spotted when fitting a cannula, the tattoo of a smiling strawberry on an otherwise stern-looking woman’s ankle.
One of the joys of moving through public space is the chance to encounter and be moved by others—to feel amusement, fury, recognition, or longing toward what they spark in us. Instinctively, one invents not only biographies and characters for those we meet, but also motivations, desires. The man is hurrying because his wife is in labor. The teenager is coming home from a party, having danced and fallen in love. The woman is buying onions for a spring tart, served to placate her difficult husband. The youth is a beauty queen. The child is a brat.
We, all of us, dance with strangers in the fertile ground of our imaginations and memories, pulling and pushing as sparks of characters, lives, appear as we take in someone’s demeanor, gestures, or clothes. And we search, instinctively, in these motifs and signals for possible biographies: lovers, careers, choices, failings.
Others will have looked at you and thought such tales, as you took the train, as you considered a purchase: imagined where you are off to, why you chose that outfit, who you’re in love with, who loves you. The role we play in the lives of strangers is always a mystery: What anger or heartbreak or fear did we cause? And why did they turn to us? What about us caught them? It is a connection void of consent, because one party is always unaware, but a union that is meaningful, valid, nonetheless. We, all of us, mist the world and its characters with our memories and needs, our whims, our lusts, our hopes, our failings, our truths.
There are a hundred portraits in this book. They look like images of “real people,” made via days, months—a full year, in fact—spent traveling the streets of Paris. Ned Rogers began the project with the idea of making portraits of memories and impressions: to create, in image, a version of the characters and individuals that feel familiar to him, from people he has come across throughout the city.
The project nods to the uniquely French history of the flâneur: wandering, observing, judging, philosophizing. All those historical judgments were, of course, laced with bias. How we treat or judge others is molded by our perspective, which is shaped, of course, by how others have treated or judged us. Lives stack on lives, experiences on experiences, and, in the flâneur’s tales, hunches and caricatures are put to record: The world is asked to stand still and control is sought over other people’s stories and images, over the madness of chance.
This series plays with those gray areas of consent, accuracy, authorship. The subjects look to be shot just as they were encountered—true to themselves. But that is not the case. The one hundred individuals were created, fashioned from individuals carefully selected by a casting director to represent Rogers’s imagined figures: the young, the old, the dreamers, the cynics, the local icons, the clichés, and the mavericks, all of whom he encountered in life, memory, fiction, art. The individuals he cast have been styled, tweaked, worked on, to become the version of themselves that Rogers first imagined: they are made flamboyant, demure, punkish, elegant, retiring, bold. Their outfits are changed, or accessorized, their makeup and hair done professionally, and they are asked to adopt certain postures or mannerisms. They make a living impression—reflections of Rogers, as much as themselves.
For some, the sitting was a chance to be their truest selves; for others, a chance to be someone else. Reality and fantasy merge and splinter. Once styled, some felt at ease, others alarmed, or even uncomfortable with how comfortable they felt in this supposedly new guise. For some, Rogers’s vision seemed to get closer to an inner truth; for others, the shock of the impression was jarring: a book read wrong. What is real? What is fake? What is them? What isn’t? Rogers asks.
Fashion image-making—Rogers’s background—has an uncomfortable relationship with truth. The industry oscillates between trends for high fantasy—escapism, glamour—and lurches toward the supposedly raw, real, or authentic (an on-trend word in the culture today). These sways usually relate to shifts in wider society, or across the political or economic landscape—at points where it feels like bad taste to be flamboyant, fashion thrills to celebrate the girls next door, the understated. This attitude can appear apologetic—as if fashion feels it should apologize for itself and its commercial aspects, or even erase itself. The supposed normality of a street cast shot in some casual location is meant to eclipse or distract from the price tag of the dress: We suspend disbelief.
I see this series as a Trojan Horse of sorts—a casual reader could pick up this book, flick through it, and be sure of what they’d seen: A series of everyday portraits, of everyday people. They would not presume that the usual mechanisms and maneuverings of fashion—the stylists, the glam teams, the location scouts, the casting directors, the team who turn people from one thing to another—played any part in this. It is, to me, like trompe l’oeil: wood decorated to look like marble, a fake window painted onto a building. A flip has occurred: While fashion often fights hard to conceal the fakery, to make it all look natural, this book conceals the real. It makes its focus the surface: the stereotypes and associations we form when encountering others.
And is there not a truth in that? Because who are any of us really? We become different things to different people: beauties to some, average to others. A joy to one person; a bore to another. To some, we are the most important person in the world, a true love, a soul mate; to others, we are a tolerated colleague, a shopper taking up too much space in the dairy aisle, an annoyingly loud breather on the tube, or someone who, for a second, looked a bit like someone else. All these versions exist, are real and beating, even if only for a moment. Is there any fact when it comes to personhood? We are, all of us, changing constantly, cells dividing and multiplying, moods shifting. Various writers have commented on the idea: depicting the self as not one linear personality, but a whole range of people who emerge one after the other, like Russian nesting dolls. Fittingly, it’s put best by Holly Brubach in her 1994 essay, “Serial Dresser,” anthologized in A Dedicated Follower of Fashion: “The older I get, the more it seems that I have been not so much one continuous person as several people, in sequence.”
We look to others to try to recognize and reconcile these past versions of ourselves. We study ourselves through comparison. The only “truth” we can be sure of in these pictures is that the final person in the image is a thread to Rogers’s impressions: to something that caught his eye or his memory. It is an accurate rendering of the reflex read that comes with a first take of a passerby, or the memory of someone who moved us. A wisp of connection, made permanent.
When not captured in image, where do they eventually go to rest, those impressions? Do they linger like auras around the people themselves? Do they split off into another dimension of space or time? Does that woman, the one you saw on the street, splinter, becoming the bibliophile divorcée, the happily married cook, the caring nurse? Or do those characters transcend to a new hazy space between imagination and memory, liberated from the present and the physical body and its props: the buttoned-up coat, the shopping bags, the face that, at first glance, looked like someone you knew.
Sometimes, I imagine them to be all around me: packing out the train carriages, making the streets too busy to walk—a glimmering multitude of people. A mad, growing population of impressions, drifting by, jostling for space or becoming, briefly, tangible on the pages of this book.
