Roissy Express

Accompanied by photographer Anaik Frantz Francois Maspero embarked on a journey along the RER the express subway which leads through the Paris suburbs. Getting off the train at each stop he and Frantz present a picture of daily life in France which tourists seldom see: a world where names don’t make sense where immigrants from Burkino Faso live in run-down tower-blocks called Debussy on the avenue Karl Marx their children dodging the police between the lycee Jules Valles and the Yuri Gagarin youth-club; a world where there are still memories of the Commune the Popular Front or the camp at Drancy from where French officials sent a hundred thousand Jews to Auschwitz; a world where no one is a racist but National Front posters are everywhere. Maspero’s aim is to put this world back on the map.