TEXT IN FRENCH   

Published in October of 1988, Truly Marseilles was my first book. My hope was to show how an authentic native of Marseilles might perceive his city. Strangely enough, my mother had given birth to me in the Beau Regard Montolivet Clinique: how’s that for a predestinating name !
In this first Opus of mine, I chose a number of places that seemed to me of particular importance such as the Longchamps palace, the Vieille Charité hospice, the medieval church of Saint-Victor…but also, the Palace of the Automobile, the high school Lycée Thiers, the Alcazar, the Crinas Wall, and the small fishing village Les Goudes on the outskirts of Marseilles.
As I was taking these pictures I was preoccupied by how Time had undone each particular site, but also how photography itself, the third dimension ! contributes to the palimpsest. As for the inhabitants, they remained behind the images. For me, a window lit in the façade of a building is more indicative of human presence than the image of a person’s face, fixed to the 8 by 5 like an entomologist’s pinned-down butterfly.
My grandfather, a weight controler who had worked all his life on the docks, and my father, a port pilot, used to say that Marseilles has for 2600 years been oriented toward the sea. However, my grandmother’s little dairy shop on the place Pierre Brossolette near the Carthusian monks bears witness to all those natives of the city who live with their backs turned to the sea, in a Marseilles of closed shutters some of whose inhabitants have never set foot on the port. If you compare this to other cities of the Mediterranean, the major contradiction of Marseilles becomes clear.
With my most recent book Marseilles, paths of intimacy (2005), the two contradictory aspects of this magical and mysterious city just mentioned have come together as though it were self-evident, and the book is articulated around them. Part one is devoted to a long stroll along the seafront from Les Goudes to Estaque, and part two is a wandering through the shutter-closed inner city in an almost random sort of way. But as you contemplate this or that image, don’t ever forget that, like Magritte’s pipe, « This is not a Postcard ! »

Marseilles is my native town. Today, however, I find it more and more difficult to find my place there. Everything changes, as time and memories go by. And that is why turning to a photographer ( as though he were a Paramedic!) can be so precious. He stops the flow, he fixes events, he frames things in such a way that the city is truly there for us with all its intense presence. This is just what Christian Ramade has done in his series of images which reveals to us Marseilles both present and plural.