All the lonely people. By Simon MERCIER and Thibault RIVIERE

I took the top photograph on 11th January 2015 in the city center of Clermont-Ferrand during the solidarity march after the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris. The big crowd is calm and sad. The photo only shows about a third of the people that were present. There are two French flags and several “Je suis Charlie” placards. It’s cold. In the background there are old and new buildings. There are little restaurants. One placard shows our local hero Vercingetorix, a symbol of resistance and freedom, carrying a big pen rather than a sword. This picture shows us that the French were united over this terrible event.

I took the second photograph on the 25th February 2015 in Rue Notre Dame du Port next to the basilica Notre Dame du Port. When I took this photo it was 8°C, cloudy and raining a bit. It was as quiet as usual. There are rarely any people or cars here. I live in this street. There’s a small place. We see two houses with three floors. One of them has a frontage, it was a shop. The other one is a bit bigger. They are quite dirty. The big wall in the foreground is dilapidated with a lot of cracks. The shutters are really dirty. There is a beautiful wall lamp.

There is an obvious contrast between the two photos: one shows a crowd, the other is empty of people. What is the same though is the cold and rainy weather, the uninteresting urban environment, and the sad atmosphere. The first photo shows a sad, fearful crowd, and the other tells of solitude. There is hope though in the first photo; in Clermont-Ferrand there were more than 70,000 “Charlies” (in Lille and Marseille, much bigger cities, there were only 30,000).

Even if, in Clermont-Ferrand, you can sometimes feel lonely and bored because there is not much to do (the first photo shows this rather well), when something goes wrong in our society, the inhabitants do come out on to the streets so as to make their voices heard…