Paris: Philippe Chancel & Gary Green : Rebels & Dandys
The spring 2021 exhibition at Galerie Miranda brings together two historical and littleknown bodies of photography that capture urban underground culture in Paris and New York in the late seventies and early eighties. At the time, Gary Green (b. 1956, USA) and Philippe Chancel (b. 1959, France) were both young photographers, in their first jobs and finding their footing as adults and as artists. Each of their series bears witness to the energy and spontaneity of youth - that of the artists, but also of the urban underground movements they were documenting. In 1982, Paris, Philippe Chancel photographed the city's rockabilly gangs composed largely of teenagers from immigrant families who sought the freedom and social integration represented by the music and clothes of postwar American pop culture, that they adapted in a kind of Parisian West Side Story. Paradoxically, at the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, New York was plunging into deep social, economic and urb...