Pierre Jouve's 'Paris sans suite': A Photographic Novel of Urban Psychogeography

Pierre Jouve, a photographer, has authored a novel titled 'Paris sans suite' in which he traverses Paris at high speed in an unmarked police car. The work is described as a reportage and a voyeuristic exploration of dangerous, marginal worlds largely unknown to him. Jouve positions himself at the threshold between two realities, akin to a female police officer and writer who committed suicide, whose encounter closes the narrative. The text blends situationist psychogeography with Bretonnian wandering, as the street surfaces intimate moments from Jouve's life. Two visions—introspection and retrospection—confront and reveal each other within the car, on crime scenes and dramas that make the city the central character. The morgue, at Paris's geographic center along the Seine, becomes the meeting point of Jouve's constructed city vision and that borrowed from the police, where death, made banal through police experience, becomes intimate again. The narrator questions who is the voyeur: the narrator, the police officer infiltrating Jouve's life, or the reader. Jouve is not a voyeur but a witness to the unknown city and his own life. His police driver, Manuel Vasques, shares his first name with writer Montalban, creator of detective Pepe Carvalho, who also wanders his city's underworld in search of himself. The review is by Alexandre Mare.