ABSTRACT
It is usual to assign the demise of French humanist street photography to the late 1950s and early 1960s and to locate the reasons for that demise in the emergence of other street-photographic traditions; the contestation of French identity in a newly multi-ethnic capital; the dispersal of the working class; the increase in the volume of traffic and the consequent diminution of habitable public spaces; the rise of television and the consequent demise of a certain kind of illustrated magazine and the increase in consumerism and consequent social homogenization. Photography revolutionized history as well. It seemed to be a precious tool of authentication, something which would sharpen the facts and clinch the evidence. The photographic past is a past of unordered moments; there is no consecutiveness of time along which the people can plot these images, all in their allotted temporal positions, and because of this absence of the consecutive, so photographs enjoy a peculiarly floating relationship with the present.
