This photograph stood apart from the 75,550 other images for a variety of reasons. It's quirky. The French major in me would say that the lighting is reminiscent of French New Wave cinema. I love color photographs; black-and-white images are generally always a little too cool for me, too revelatory for my liking.
Quirkiness aside, the background imagery was vaguely familiar to me. Why is there a lone man reading a newspaper on a racetrack? I clicked on the image and there the title was -Vélodrome d'Hiver. The image suddenly left a bad taste in my mouth. Vel d'Hiver is rather infamous and when I had last seen images of it the stadium had been full of Parisian Jews, Roms, and other "undesirables". In July 1942, the Parisian civil government arrested nearly 15,000 men, women and children and housed them for several days in the stadium. Beneath the beautifully stained glass roof there were no bathrooms, no food, and only a single tap for water. Those that survived were almost exclusively deported to Auschwitz. Those images, limited though they are, are as despairing and chaotic as any could be.
This image was taken a decade later (the stadium burned down in 1959), and is one of the last images taken. After processing the context of the image, I think too revelatory is good. How frivolous the sporting event seems to be! The subject appears indolent, nonchalant about his endeavor. The room is empty, is it early or late or neither -does no one care? Despite the lack of color and Instagram filter, the emphasis is firmly on the lone racer, highlighting his solitude.
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