Photos - Joe

Some clichés become clichés because they’re true. An image can offer an emotional understanding of an event that a thousand words cannot. We read about “police brutality” and we know intellectually what that means, but in some photographs, like those of Gilles Caron, we feel it viscerally. He shows us how during the “night of the barricades,” a student has crawled under a bench. He has an arm held up to ward off a blow from a police baton. The police officer is stretching out to try to reach him. He must work hard to get to the student who only wants to get away. In another photograph, a woman lies prone bleeding as a police officer is in the middle of hitting her again. In a third, a student runs low to the ground trying to escape from a police officer racing to club him, his long baton held high.

In looking at the images of May 1968 on video and in the Maison de Europeene de La Photographie, I’ve been struck by several things. One is the clothes. These student “revolutionaries” wear ties, button-down shirts and dress shoes. They hurl stones in sport jackets. Twenty years later the photographer Dityvon publishes a collection of his photographs of the time, Impressions de Mai, and asks: Where’s the long-hair? Where are the bell bottom pants? He acknowledges that memory plays tricks. These students weren’t hippies. The photographs have the truth of the moment rather than what the moment has become in the popular imagination. The police also wear ties along with their helmets and riot goggles.

Another is the various ages on all sides. We tend to think of it as being all college students on one side and older people on the other. This wasn't the case. For one, the students were joined in the marches and protests by professors, people in the neighborhood, and high school teenagers. And, there were college students and college-aged people protesting against the protesters.

In another photo of Caron’s, a beautiful image of people sunbathing along the Seine becomes more evocative with its caption which explains it’s May 1968. As Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” points out, there are always people close by to an event who don’t particularly care that it’s happening. A similarly striking image in the William Klein film Grands Soirs et Petits Matins, shows a man calmly reading a newspaper in a fourth floor apartment, and the camera pans down to show riot police walking the street.