Crossings

Duncan taught photography in USD’s study abroad program in Paris beginning in the 1990s. During this time, he sometimes investigated the city’s formal gardens and arcades in a manner that recalled the late nineteenth-century photographs of Eugène Atget. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, however, that he began to look closely at more iconic Parisian tourist destinations as sites of a peculiar social tension and lasting visual interest. The series known as Crossings began in earnest with the photographer’s recognition of the different groups that congregated and swarmed around the base of the Eiffel Tower. Many visitors carried digital cameras with them, but their lenses always tended to be aimed at the monument or at themselves. Duncan turned his camera instead toward the tourists and the other large population that could be found there: souvenir sellers, many of whom were recent immigrants from Africa. Crossings captures the visual and economic disparities between the leisured tourists and those who struggle to make a living from them. Somehow Duncan manages to inhabit the role of an inconspicuous observer of multiple dramas: individuals posing for unseen audiences, groups mugging for the camera, salesmen hurriedly gathering trinkets to escape law enforcement. Although most of his subjects seem blissfully unaware that they are being studied, the artist did acquire a small collection of miniature Eiffel Towers from souvenir sellers in exchange for their permission to take these photographs.