These masterful pictures show America through the eyes of a gifted French photographer

Jean-Pierre Laffont saw a nation reborn through crisis

Robin Williams and a street performer in front of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. September 1981. (From New York City Up and Down by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2017)

It’s a rich tradition, French observers in America. From Alexis de Tocqueville to Jean Baudrillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the U.S. has captivated Franco-philosophers for almost as long as it’s been a nation. America has always represented the future. A new world where history is sloughed off, the ultimate petri dish for democracy and liberty. And with cultural exceptionalism being a long-standing tenet of French identity, it’s no wonder its writers and thinkers would be drawn to the New World in search of inspiration, and a sometimes smug confirmation of their own superiority. In America, Baudrillard’s loquacious 1988 sweep across the states, the prominent postmodernist describes “a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.”

Smoke from fireworks drifts past the Statue of Liberty during celebrations of the U.S. Bicentennial, July 4, 1976. (From New York City Up and Down by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2017)

French photojournalist Jean-Pierre Laffont arrived in America in 1965 with his own ambitions to explore what Baudrillard would come to call “the only remaining primitive society.” Based in New York, Laffont was the sole America correspondent for the Gamma Photo Agency, and through the 1970s and 80s he would use his position to scour the contours of a nation caught between social change (civil rights, women’s liberation, gay pride) and the realities of economic decline (gas shortages, industrial malaise, the slow death of small farming). Seen together in a pair of recent monographs, the Frenchman’s oeuvre is a pastiche of flags, crowds, and other politically loaded symbols of American innocence and vulgarity. Laffont’s extended photo essays on inner-city youth gangs, a failed rock festival in Connecticut, pet cemeteries, and a nefarious Oregon cult reveal a fragmented society at once marked by optimism and paralyzed by disappointment. But from this “ball of confusion,” as Laffont, who remains in New York remarks, comes a fuller picture of the “chaotic, often painful birth of the country we live in today.”

Photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont in Brooklyn, summer of 1966. (From New York City Up and Down by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2017)

(From New York City Up and Down by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2017)

(left) Crowd at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, New York, 1973. | (right) Demonstrator outside the Outside of the 30th Republican Convention, Miami, Florida, 1972. (From Photographer’s Paradise by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2016)

Women soldiers take part in basic training against atomic radiation in Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1980. (From Photographer’s Paradise by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2016)

Firefighters on the Lower East Side, 1973. (From New York City Up and Down by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2017)

(left) Inmates in “The Tombs” jail in Lower Manhattan, New York City, 1972. | (right) Two homeless men squat below the recently constructed World Trade Center in New York City, 1975. (From Photographer’s Paradise by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2016)

Brooklyn, 1971. (From New York City Up and Down by Jean-Pierre Laffont, © 2017)

Photographer’s Paradise: Turbulent America 1960–1990 and New York City Up and Down, by Jean-Pierre Laffont, are published by Glitterati Incorporated.