BackWith an analogic camera as his only tool, the photographer Laurent Kronental digs us into de center of some of the majestic urban developments built in the suburbs of Paris in the middle of the 19th century. Souvenirs d´un Futur documents the life of senior citizens still living in those dwellings. Nowadays, the French society rejects these uninhabited urban landscapes because of its origins: address the housing crisis and suffocate the inflow of foreign migrants between de 50s and the 80s.The grandious efforts made to enhance the French values led into gigantic volumes closer to the modernist utopia than to a more appropriate human scale.
A great amount of architects showed interest for these projects. Some of the featured designs are Les Tours Aillaud, by Emile Aillaud, Les Damiers, in west Paris, and La Cité du Parc, by Jean Renaudie and Reneé Gailhoustet amongst others. All of them share a common aspect, the signs of long lives both in its façades and dwellers.
Through this series, Laurent Kronental proves the poetry of aging environments slowly vanishing, and with them, the memory of modernist utopia
