ZOOM MAGAZINE, ISSUE NO. 22, FEATURING ROBERT D’AMORE JANVIER/FEVRIER, 1974

A nude girl

lying on her bed

her blood like ink and in a dark mood; “but what am I doing here?”

And outside, the world...

Ah, ah, ah, the world in full swing.

The stock market, the dollar up, the franc heavy and consumption . Pleasure for twenty francs an hour, life at two-hundred miles per hour,

The cars, the exchangers, neon, cinemas, money, the cops,

Some loot, the police, such a roar, close the window, the construction sites, the rattle of the metro, the wailing of a siren, come on, let’s get out of here.

Silence!

The silence of the night

The rocking of the “rocking chair,

Time already gone,

Time to get undressed,

Time for an eternity of love,

Time for the woman to roll over in the sheets, Time for the naked man to watch his children play, Time to take time and think of nothing else.

And over there, in the city, there where a taste for time, has for

Such a long time been forgotten, the photographer shows the images he has captured.

Images of love, fleeting images, carnal and sensual, thoughtful images that resonate in one’s head, and we say to ourselves, my God, why not?

And the gray man, the important town official, takes all this in, and is afraid.

He forbids this odious demonstration that calls into question his beautiful, gray, world.

He censors, castrates, cuts and cuts out.

He mutilates this evocative way of thinking, he snuffs out this incantation, this song of despair yet full of hope, these “blues” to the love of life.

And then this gray man, who has not yet recovered from his encounter, the gray man who makes everything gray, shuffles off to lose himself in the grayness of his town.

And the photographer goes away sadly- even though we warned him- Keeping only the one image he still has of the town:

a big gray wall, plastered in newspapers that recounts the life of the gray man.

And in front of that wall, a girl walks by... 

by Ludovic Pierret

Translated by Katherine James