Words and images by Benoit Gomez-Kaine | Website | Instagram
My childhood memories take me back to the railway town of Venarey-les-Laumes in France’s Cotê-d’Or region, a few hours south-east of Paris. On the estates there I ate ants, built huts and learned to ride a bicycle without stabilisers and then without hands. On weekends and vacations, I wore clothes "to hang out in". In 1998, when Zinedine Zidane scored against Brazil during the final of the football world cup, I was allowed to stay up late with the grown-ups. However, by the time Trezeguet scored the golden goal against Italy two years later, my father had decided that we should leave the housing estates and so we did. Twenty years have passed since that European Cup final in 2000 and now I have returned to document the estates of my childhood and those that live in them.
At the end of the 19th century, in a rapidly industrialising France, demand for railroads was booming. The area that now makes up Venarey-les-Laumes was chosen to be the site of a railway hub and as a consequence attracted a large population of railway workers to the region. With the influx of workers the need for housing in the area grew to the point that in 1912 it was decided that a new town would be created and later, in 1926, expanded. Following a traditional model for building estates, housing was constructed, as well as shops, a school, a library, a leisure center, and even a church. Influenced by the hygienist movement, the architects designed the housing to be perceived as a symbol of modernity, with all the fixtures necessary to create a community.
Until the end of the 30-year post-war boom, the apartments were exclusively reserved for railway workers and their families. Then, as the boom slowed and the number of railway workers decreased, the apartments transitioned into broader social housing which, rather than being reserved for a specific group, was offered to anyone in need of it. Today, the housing estates of Venarey-les-Laumes are no longer inhabited by a community of workers but by a community of low-income households, living in an environment designed a century ago to meet the needs of a different populace.
Each home has the same box to fill. Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a toilet, a hallway and two balconies. With the more individual lives that the residents now live there comes a form of self-expression in the way one arranges an interior, a more or less constructed projection. This creates an image for any visitor while another image, more difficult to control, is the one that the photographer strives to capture. It is the fruit of an encounter. These portraits of residents represent the combination of these two images. A superimposition between the story built for the visitor and the stories shared with the photographer.
In these photographs I focused on the apartment interiors, returning to the rooms I have known. In one, I talk with Sandrine and her daughter Mélie in their kitchen, a room in which I used to live. I take a look outside and remember that as a kid I used to pee on the balcony of the neighbors below me as a joke. We decided to do a portrait with the cats in Melie's bedroom, my old living room. I had an Indian tent where her bed sits now.
The transition from housing workers from a specific industry to housing for anyone has been a broader trend in France and has resulted in a move away from communal living to that of a more individual approach. In Venarey-les-Laumes, the railway workers' infrastructure has been broken up with the original shops, library and the social center being relocated or replaced; the new superstore covers most needs. The previously homogenous inhabitants have been replaced by a far more heterogeneous group, upending the way people live together. "We're all a bit wild," says Nadine, who has lived here for over 30 years. "Before, we all lived together," says Jean-Pierre, a retired railway worker. Yet even with this change, there is a general feeling of tranquility and a gentle way of life that reigns in Venarey-les-Laumes. An attitude of "every man for himself" now defines an ideal type of life and with that, the inhabitants feel comfortable.