About the Sartre Project

This project was borne of a fascination with Jean-Paul Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy of novels. Most of the scenes within the books are firmly set in Paris, with the exceptions of the Padoux, New York and Marseille scenes. But unlike James Joyce's Ulysses which has created an industry devoted to following Leopold Bloom's footsteps through Dublin, Sartre's trilogy has yet to spawn an equivalent devoted to those places, those streets, those buildings, those bars and cafes and more, used by Sartre in his fiction.

It took a month to complete the project, and nearly all the photographs used here were taken on location at the specific addresses mentioned in the books (the only non-original photograph is that taken of the school children from the Padoux School, which was taken from the Padoux website).

 thanks to Chris, the concierge at 46 Rue Jacob, the proprietor of the Vagabond Gallery in Rue des Saints-Peres, but most of all to Jean-Paul Sartre himself, and to all those Parisiens who may have inadvertently ended up in some of these photographs.