This artbook is a story about the Paris métro. The Paris Métro opened in 1900. Almost 120 years later – in 2018 – I entered this subway to discover what is most beautiful in this closed communication space. I’ve traveled all 16 lines, visiting each of the 305 stations, where each one is a different story. I’ve traveled with an iPhone 8. All the photos in this book were taken just with this camera.
Its narration is linear. Turning the pages, we travel on the Parisian metro, all lines, passing all stations, but not stopping at all of them. Opening the book, we get into the subway car, finish it, get off the train and head to the exit, following the sign with the word Sortie. The publication is a continuous journey, each chapter is a subway line, and the pages are stations.
The layout of the book, however, is not standard. It includes alongies, i.e. spreads consisting of more than two pages. The editorial solution, which is the use of a different layout of pages in the form of elongated spreads, gave me the opportunity to present some stations in their entirety.
Detail
In the book, I used only three base colors: black, blue and green. Blue is closely associated with station name plates, it is why I’ve printed most of the texts in my book on blue. Green is conection with the first entrances to the subway, Art Nouveau pavilions designed by Guimard, the shade of green used in the publication is fluorescent and more modern. The black color, completely contrasting with green and nature, is associated with a dark subway tunnel. I combined green with pure printing black, which I considered a natural color for my original photographs. Black and white photographs, contrasting with the white of the paper, reminded me of daily newspapers that are present in the space of the métro. Usually black and white photos, developed in the traditional analog way, evoke in the imagination something old, images of the past. This is also what I associate with the Paris metro. Line No. 5, with the Bastille station is a unique point on the metro map. Therefore, to present it, I decided to use the red color, which doesn’t appear in any other part of the publication. The station is located under Bastille Square, and on its platforms we can see the remains of the walls of the Bastille destroyed during the French Revolution. The red color is very visible at this station in real and is the color of the French flag, and the revolution itself was a turning point in the history of the country, I decided to add another color - red.
The publication was entirely printed using analog printing methods. I based the project on two printing techniques: risography and silkscreen. The green color was printed by silkscreen. Riso, on the other hand, allowed me to print the entire book in an analog way. The risograph gave the effect of imprecise printing, associated with copying on photocopiers, „dirty” printing, with visible imperfections in its perfection, which is strongly associated with the aesthetics of the Paris metro.
cover
The binding of the book is a traditional Swiss hardcover. The colors used are white, associated with the color of tiles at Paris metro stations, and blue, which dominates the publication. The facings - front and back - are to imitate the wall of the station covered with white tiles. The whole is complemented by a transparent dust jacket, on which the letter M was printed using the silkscreen, which is a multiplication of the motif from the title page. The letter on the dust jac- ket has been half rasterized. The premise of this procedure was to refer to movement, an image that is blurred by the speed of the subway car speeding through the subway tunnel.
maps
The book also has pages that fold out like a poster or a map. In my book, I include two that act as guides. The first map is a projection on the Paris metro grid, where I marked my daily route. The second is the most important and famous monuments or places in Paris that we can visit by traveling by metro, with an indication of which metro line will take us to famous place.
video of the book
Title: Métro jako księga miasta / Le métro comme un livre de la ville
Photos in the book: Justyna Jędrysek /
Text: Justyna Jędrysek /
Translation: dr Marcelina Bańkowska /
Print: Justyna Jędrysek, Jooyoung Choi /
Photo documentation: Grzegorz Izdebski /
Projekt współfinansowany przez Narodowe Centrum Kultury w ramach stypendium Młoda Polska 2020
