The Palais de Tokyo bookstore has probably one of the best selection of magazines to discover in the city. Yesterday I was going through the latest edition of Hobo Magazine. It's a very glossy, quite fancy yet hipsterièsque multidisciplinary magazine covering stardom, art, travel, etc. This month two photographic stories were strikingly comparable: one of everyday scenes in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris and another somewhere on the Californian Coast with dashing sunlight and seascapes.
In my opinion none of the two were particularly remarkable in originality, both reflecting the current style of naïve Vice reportage meets a 70s photographic medium. However what was interesting is the instinctual reaction both my friend (living in the 19th) and I had to the Parisian photos - utterly uninteresting, rather banal and definitely not capturing the parc's people, space and overall identity within the makeup of the city. But without that power of critic we just absorbed the Californian images as truth - the sun looks amazing, the cliffs breath-taking, etc... and without the power to fathom how much we were missing and how much was constructed we simply cruised through the pages.
