There are a hundred portraits in this book. They look like images of “real people,” made via days, months—a full year, in fact—spent traveling the streets of Paris. Ned Rogers began the project with the idea of making portraits of memories and impressions:to create, in image, a version of the characters and individuals that feel familiar to him, from people he has come across throughout the city. The project nods to the uniquely French history of the flâneur: wandering, observing, judging, philosophizing. All those historical judgments were, of course, laced with bias. How we treat or judge others is molded by our perspective, which is shaped, of course, by how others have treated or judged us. Lives stack on lives, experiences on experiences, and, in the flâneur’s tales, hunches and caricatures are put to record: The world is asked to stand still and control is sought over other people’s stories and images, over the madness of chance.

This series plays with those gray areas of consent, accuracy, authorship. The subjects look to be shot just as they were encountered—true to themselves. But that is not the case. The one hundred individuals were created, fashioned from individuals carefully selected by a casting director to represent Rogers’s imagined figures: the young, the old, the dreamers, the cynics, the local icons, the clichés, and the mavericks, all of whom he encountered in life, memory, fiction, art. The individuals he cast have been styled, tweaked, worked on, to become the version of themselves that Rogers first imagined: they are made flamboyant, demure, punkish, elegant, retiring, bold. Their outfits are changed, or accessorized, their makeup and hair done professionally, and they are asked to adopt certain postures or mannerisms. They make a living impression—reflections of Rogers, as much as themselves.

Self Published, 2025
Linen Hardcover
220 pages
10 × 12.75 inches