L'Image Obscène / The Obscene Image: Parisian Hospital Break Room Graffiti

A photographic record of the painted salles de garde of Paris, the hospital break rooms whose walls carry generations of obscene murals made by the medical staff who eat and rest in them.

Gilles Tondini photographed the frescoes in a dozen hospitals of greater Paris, from the Hôtel-Dieu and La Pitié-Salpêtrière to Paul-Brousse and Gustave-Roussy in Villejuif and André-Mignot in Versailles, several of them rarely documented before. The imagery is sexual by rule, but its sources run from the Last Judgement and chivalric romance to comic-book heroes and villains. Marie L. Bouchon's introduction traces the custom from the barber-surgeons of the medieval period into the hospital buildings of the eighteenth century onward, and explains the codes that govern who may paint and what. Bilingual French and English throughout, translated by Jake Davis; 160 pages, hardcover, published in New York by Mark Batty Publisher in 2010, with Libération giving the book a feature on release.

Tondini, a photographer based in France, had documented the city's catacombs and tunnels for the same publisher in Paris Underground; here he applies the same access to a subculture closed even to most Parisians.