Mon quartier vu de ma fenêtre

In the wake of May 1968, Didier Bay began documenting the daily life of return-to-order Paris such as it was visible through a telephoto lens that he positioned in the window of his Latin Quarter apartment. Nine years later, he published 'Mon quartier vu de ma fenêtre' which presents sequences of small black-and-white photographs of local residents in their homes and in the street accompanied by type-written explanatory narratives. At a time when sociologists were restructuring the landscape and politics of post-World War II France, Bay considered himself a “sociological” artist. Yet, unlike sociology engineered for technocracy, Bay’s sociology did not quantify in order to categorize. Instead, the distant and multiply fragmenting views of his neighbors expressed a profound suspicion that it is impossible to fix social knowledge due to the insularity of the private individuals who compose a society.