Boogie Blasts Paris

I've covered the Serbian-born, crackhead-blasting photographer Boogie before, for both Morphizm and Salon. The reason is simple: His uncompromising portraits of stressed lives is a hard-hitting as anything I've seen or heard in the last several years. Now Morphizm's pals at powerHouse Books sent me a heads-up on Boogie January exhibition in France:

Boogie Exhibition @ Colette
213 Rue St. Honore, Paris
January 7–26, 2008

For more on Boogie, check out the following pieces I mentioned above. The good shit.

Mean Streets: An Interview with Boogie
[Scott Thill, Salon]
America's unending war on poverty and drugs has been about as successful as its unending war on terror, mainly because its enemies are abstractions. Meanwhile, the real worlds (not the ones you see on MTV) of drug and thug culture have been left to wither, like its victims and champions, beneath a glossy simulacrum. Few are those souls who seek to document and transmit the routinized pain and addiction of these worlds -- worlds filled with everything but Cristal Champagne, Hummers and supermodels. Rather, they are the scenes of unending wars whose only victory is another fix; once each fix is achieved the whole process starts over again like a nightmarish rerun. So it should come as no surprise that those who journey into the hearts of darkness that pump lifeblood into these circular hells might know their way around a war zone... MORE

I Am Not a Moralist: An Interview with Boogie
[Miss Rosen, Morphizm]
"Am I a moralist? Hmm, I don't know. The whole story about photographers doing what they do because they want to change the world, expose harsh reality of wars, starvation, violence—is aaaaaagh, crap. They (me too, I guess) do what they do because it gives them thrills. They become addicted to the adrenalin rush, to the world not everyone is allowed to see. You go to the crackhouse, and there is a chance that something bad will happen to you—then everything turns out to be OK. You get out of there, take a deep breath, and trust me, it's your best breath of air, ever. I don't judge people I am photographing. They made some wrong choices in life, and they were too weak to keep fighting, they just gave up. So I guess we're not gonna change the world, but rather show it as is, fucked up to the bone..." MORE