Bettina Lockemann

“On Saturday, 14 November 2015, as we were walking through the city, we saw that the people selling fruit and vegetables on the Boulevard de Rochechouart had already unloaded the crates from their cars before realizing that the state of emergency that had been imposed on Paris also affected their market. They stood around, uncertain what to do. They weren’t quite ready to pack up their perishable goods again. The terrorist attacks had had an impact on them too. It was only later that I realized that I should have recorded the situation, that it revealed more about the day than the endless repeats of reports from the scene and rituals of grief.” This was the entry Jan Wenzel, publisher of Spector Books, posted in his Facebook blog. The État d’urgence affected everyone who was in the capital at the time. Like so many of her colleagues, Bettina Lockemann had travelled to the city to attend Paris Photo. On 14 November 2015 she roamed through the city with her camera, recording the oppressive atmosphere in its streets and squares.

Using the visual rhetoric and neutral patina of documentary photography, Bettina Lockemann (born 1971) portrays urban environments steeped in the paranoiac atmospheres of surveillance and conspiratorial activity. Her photographs of blockades, vans and helicopters, taken in locations varying from Tokyo to Washington, D.C., as well as other series, are collected in this monograph.