Old vs new. By Vincent MERCIER

A scary building

I took this picture on the 16th February 2015 in Clermont-Ferrand, at the Carmes near Michelin. This is a picture of an old building which is abandoned. There are some tags and old posters which are not white but grey because there are very old. The wall isn't the same colour everywhere. I noticed the smell of car exhaust fumes. It is always cold in this street because of the wind.

This is a very ordinary street. There is an old building which looks abandoned. There is a lot of graffiti, some good, most of it ugly. There are also posters which were stuck up six or seven years ago. The wall is very ugly grey and beige. The whitish-brown shutters are rotting. The sky is blue.

This picture shows that the city hasn’t been modernised everywhere. People could live here, but the local authorities haven’t done anything to redevelop the area.

A modern building

I took this picture of Centre Jaude2 on the same day as the other one. It shows a very modern building with an enormous bay window. The name of the building is written in big reds letters. Most of the time there are lots of people here. This place smells of cigarettes and food.

People are walking around; they look very small because the building is so big. There is an apartment block on the left. The walls are grey and brown and it looks very pretty. The only thing that spoils the picture is the pylon for the tramway (I approve of the tramway though because it has reduced the number of cars in the town centre). This photograph shows that the city centre is well developed. It also shows the good side of Clermont because it's a really modern building and a beautiful commercial centre.

The two areas shown in these photos are very different: one is often crowded and the other is rarely visited. Why is it that you can find ugly, old, abandoned buildings and, less than a kilometre away, there are beautiful, busy modern ones?