Located on the 42,5 th parallel, the charming city shares this latitude in good neighborhood ……. Orvieto and its Fra Angelico, Sarajevo and its photo museum of horrors, Byzantium and its “it’s Byzantium!”, Tachkent and its Uzbek markets, the Gobi in Chinese “Chao Mo”, Vladivostok and its railroad terminal ? Sapporo and its Ainu listed by all photo magazines, Rochester… hey yes! Finally, Perpignan, a city forgotten by the media on the edge of a highway, with two exits, one to the east, the other to the west, and, for the past five years, thanks to a tenacious municipality and a few decision-makers, its great fresco of the Riches Heures de la Photo.

That’s Perpignan !
Its Palace of the Kings of Majorca….Its Hyacinthe-Rigaud Museum…..Its Place Arago …… Its Castillet……Its Place de la Loge…… Its Lodge of the Sea…. Its Cathedral St Jean…….St Jacques and Its Cross to the outrages….and the rest!!!!
A pink city, brick color, the chance to be tanned all year round.
The rest? The rest! The reliefs of an unconsumed feast, with masked guests, barricades in a labyrinth of fossilized lanes, lined with stylized dwellings, keystones of the 13th century, very Quintocento crossings, a disorder of patios of anonymous architecture, a Venetian digest, you will find there Seville and Firenze.

So it all starts at night, the silence is constructive, a few TVs scatter the storms of a rugby match, from a window flows a stream of light overlapped with gypsy song, the scent of cooking like a billiard ball ricochets from wall to wall, my guide Yvette la Rousse affirms that a capon has just come out of an oven, not the chicken … the giant fish with the head of a feline. And then it will be a maze of discoveries.

Pierre Bouat – Spring 1993