Connection and peripheral encounters in Paris bout du monde and Les Passagers du Roissy-Express: text and photography by François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz

This article deals with questions of transit and home, as well as with externality, internality and representation in photography and text by François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz, mainly concerning the Parisian suburbs. The focus is on their collaborative travel work, Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990), which stresses that the travellers’ representation of experience, whether in text or in images, must remain incomplete and external to the lives they portray. The article also demonstrates the greater, yet problematic, sense of intimacy in Paris bout du monde (1992), a book of Frantz’s photographs with a short text by Maspero. Like Les Passagers, Paris bout du monde focuses on marginalized Parisians, yet differs in its stress on living spaces photographed from within. As with the earlier text, the emphasis is on transitory spaces, and it too suggests the incomplete and reductive nature of photographic representation