A working-class neighborhood in Paris, its market, trafficking, and kebab, bodies intersecting, sometimes presenting. Money flows at the rate of looks. Cigarette vendors reign beneath the metro overpass at Barbès. They are champions of observation; nothing escapes their notice. The series Princes of the Streets is part of Hahn’s work-in-progress Boyzone, a project analyzing moments in which men’s bodies choreograph their relationship to public and private space. Bodies and looks: Hahn’s film and photography on communities and rituals goes beyond the subject’s consenting to be viewed, showing how social beings make use of the gaze we turn towards them in order to express themselves: let yourself be seen without being had. By including archival photos, Hahn creates a desynchronization that allows invisible genealogies to come forward. These young men are descendants of French heroes recruited during the colonial period. Barbès, the Cour des Miracles, takes in both elderly and outsider, but the wounds of the marginalized are difficult to heal—flesh scars just like memory.

Michel Poivert