Anonym

Flaking paintwork. A shop selling postcards as old as the district. The heart of Paris.
The chimes sound as you open the door. Dirn light, a musty smell. Everywhere, even on the counter, there are crates, files, albums, labelled bt)xes containing tightly packed rows of pictures, tons of them, the candid archives of a time lang Aast. Posters brighten one wall, columns of newspapers and magazines hold up the ceiling. You Slip into a Labyrinth of yellowed documents. Here, a wad of banknotes from the Revolution. There, behind a box of rationing coupons and other relics from the war, autographs, portraits of actors — a dedicated Photograph of Maurice Chevalier. The shop also sells — but you have to ask — photographs of nudes.
The owner is fifty, sixty years old. A lifetime spent subsisting on paper seasoned with dust. He Looks you up and down before taking out from behind his desk a shoe box,-then another, this one with a rubber band around it. This one contains 'special' Photos. Then he asks the question, both suspicious and indifferent. "Are you a connoisseur?"
Most of them are small-format snapshots, some are just contact shects. Faded, damaged, sometimes dog-eared, they show bodies, undraped, spread out, intertwined. You think they show all the possible positions, but there is not a vast range of variations, the same combinations are repeated. But the connoisseur is looking for something else. He is looking for details, discordant details: a peculiar physical feature, unusual costumes or settings, the expression of a genuine sentiment, overabundant Imagination, excess, the smallest curiosity which he will perhaps,be alone in noticing, but which delights him, which for him suddenly opens the doorbto a world of wonders.
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neuwertig, sehr gut erhalten