When asked to picture the streets of Paris, it might be challenging to deviate from images of the crowded boulevards, full of the café-concerts made popular by the end of the nineteenth century, with bodies dancing through the streets to the notes of Joe Dassin’s Les Champs Élysées or Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. Arturo Oliva Pedroza’s Kissed Face offers something else. Instead, Pedroza gives calm, straightforward shots of hangouts in Paris—the romance of dimly lit spaces, of an evening’s early stages of debauchery, and of a slice of pizza.
These photographs emerged from Pedroza’s studies in Paris during 2009 and 2010. While photography itself functions in degrees of stillness—capturing, suspending, and depicting moments for infinite pictorial existence—Pedroza’s photographs have an echo to them. These sounds reverberate in the washed-out backgrounds of Pedroza’s nightly strolls, in the objects once loved, but set aside, and in the fleeting engagements with strangers. There is a softness in each frame that invites a viewer to stay awhile, to share a drag of a cigarette, and to watch the smoke make its way quickly into the sky.
Opening Reception Thursday, October 4th 5-10PM
Closing Reception Saturday, October 20th 5PM
Book & Job Gallery 838 Geary St, San Francisco, CA 94109