The big picture: desperate lives in Stéphane Duroy’s 1980s Paris

News Snapshot:

Stéphane Duroy spent nearly two years in the late 1980s photographing west African immigrants in Paris, in particular in the Îlot Chalon, a district behind the Gare de Lyon that had been home to different waves of arrivals in the city – Italian, Chinese, Moroccan – for two centuries. His series Harlem-sur-Seine – the title an ironic reference to the progressive jazz-age integration of the 1920s – won him a World Press Photographer award. Revisiting that series now, in a new book of Duroy’s pictures, is to be cast into a place of extreme dereliction. From the early 1980s, when...