From jubilant World Cup celebrations and LGBTQ+ satisfaction commemorations to marches in solidarity with the Yellow Vests, Black Lives Matter and #JeSuisCharlie actions, the Place de la République is the place Parisians have been gathering to protest, cheer and mourn for effectively over a century. Yet in her République sequence, photographer Bérangère Fromont turns away from the political protests and the spectacles of dissent. Instead, she trains her lens on a group simply as integral to the sq. – one which embodies a extra ambiguous sort of resistance.
In Fromont’s tightly framed, chiaroscuro portraits of the younger skate boarders who’ve known as dibs on its many ramps and curbs, the gathering spot transforms right into a dramatic stage the place meditative faces and bruised torsos bathe within the French capital’s harsh summer season mild. “Spending time there, I quickly realised they are its main inhabitants, in that they’re always present, no matter what’s going on in the city or the world,” Fromont tells Dazed, including that she initially got down to painting the place, not the skate boarders. “I call them the Princes of the Square – as boys vastly outnumber girls – because they have this performative side where they’ll show off a little for the daily passersby who snap pictures of them.”
The notion of resistance, each particular person and collective, has been a recurring thread all through Fromont’s physique of labor, most lately in L’amour seul brisera nos cœurs (2022), supposed to make up for the under-representation of lesbian love in artwork historical past, and Except the Clouds (2018), concerning the turbulent revolts that rocked Athens and left residents considering a world in ruins.
In République, resistance is conveyed by way of the determine of the younger skater throwing himself into the unknown, apprehensive about what comes subsequent, and within the act of repurposing public constructions for frolicsome, non-commercial pursuits. Also, in accordance with Fromont, resistance comes within the radical risk of softness itself. “Given all the uncertainty youths currently face about the future, choosing gentleness is a radical act,” she explains. “They’re not raising their fists or shouting slogans. They’re engaged in a quieter, more poetic kind of resistance, expressed by their lifestyle. I was really drawn to that.”
Fromont’s portraits recall the work of time-honoured chroniclers of adolescence equivalent to Gus Van Sant and British photographer Paul Graham, whose End of an Age sequence encapsulated the delicate and at occasions solitary second when youth begins to slide away. “I wanted my pictures to evoke [the skateboarders’] grace and vulnerability. There’s something moving about their visible scars and melancholic gazes, while at other times their posture suggests nonchalance and self-assuredness. That contrast really rang true to me.”
A key distinction between Van Sant and Graham lies in Fromont’s whole eschewal of posed portraiture. Her labour-intensive course of concerned capturing underneath the blazing solar with a hefty medium-format Mamiya movie digicam. She additionally opted for a 50 mm lens, taking pretty wide-angle pictures she would then crop in post-production to isolate and enlarge compelling particulars. “Physically and mentally, it was quite the ordeal,” she says, explaining why the analogue-only venture took three years to finish. “To return every day in 40-degree weather with four kilos on my back, when it had been two weeks since I last captured anything good, was a struggle.”
She compares her “failure-plagued” course of to that of the skaters, who typically accumulate intense wipeouts and faceplants earlier than efficiently touchdown a trick. “As a photographer, all these variables – sunlight, subject movement, camera mechanics, sheer luck – need to align, and the same goes for them,” she explains. “They need good technique, smooth ground, grit and a moment of grace to nail their manoeuvres. Otherwise, they dust themselves off and try again. That mindset speaks volumes about this generation, and it ultimately fuelled my persistence to keep returning to the square.”
Fromont doesn’t shrink back from expressing her admiration for the pensive skaters and younger onlookers who fill her frames. The means her stark mild sculpts their expressive options appears like a pure extension of the sq.’s bronze figures and stone statues watching over them – one thing she acknowledges was deliberate. “I sought such visual harmony in my selection of images,” she recollects. “To draw out that kind of timeless, marble-like quality in the faces and bodies. It’s my way of saying that this beauty really exists. It’s not fabricated; I simply captured it.”
République is revealed by Chose Commune and is now accessible here. An accompanying exhibition will present on the Institut pour la Photographie, Lille, from 18 September 2026 to 16 January 2027.