Julie Glassberg, Life in Full Neon

IN IMAGES

**The French photographer has taken over the Carré de Baudouin, in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, with “**L’être et le néon” , an immersive exhibition devoted to three communities who, from Sunday dance halls to Japanese highways, inject color into the everyday.

_By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Julie Glassberg._

Some gestures slip past the usual categories of work and leisure. Painting a truck in flames, dancing every Sunday despite the passing years, building bicycles made for vertiginous jousts: so many ways of reclaiming one’s body, one’s turf, one’s life.

One day, on the terrace of La Coupole, the storied brasserie on Boulevard du Montparnasse (Paris’s 14th arrondissement), an elegant older woman told the photographer she came to dance every Sunday, sometimes finding love along the way. That encounter gave rise to Stayin’ Alive, winner of the BnF’s Grande Commande in 2022: portraits of seniors for whom retirement is no obstacle to staying active, or to having fun.

In New York, Julie Glassberg joined the Black Label Bike Club, founded in 1992 in Minneapolis, pioneers of tall-bikes and anarchic jousting. That immersion produced Bike Kill, a portrait of a punk, grunge, and hippie community resisting consumer culture and cultivating human connection.

In Japan, Julie Glassberg spent eight years documenting the life of the Utamarokai club and crossed paths with Tajima-san, owner of the truck Ichibanboshi. Born as an advertising gimmick, these neon-drenched cabs tell, beneath their bad-boy image, stories of nostalgia and childhood dreams made real. Never exhibited before, the Dekotora series, subject of a forthcoming book from Patrick Frey this year, closes out this vivid, color-soaked triptych.