Shopping The Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen Flea Market in 1990

We’re browsing the stalls at Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen, the wold’s largest antiques and second-hand goods market, in Paris, France. Peter Marshall was staying in Noisy-le-Grand in the city’s eastern suburbs when he mooched to the market. Taken on walks around the area and neighbouring towns and along the River Marne, as well as on trips to Paris and Versailles, Peter’s photographs take us to a time and place.

 

 

“As a part of my work on this holiday I began to experiment rather crudely with panoramic photography,” says Peter. “Kodak had introduced the ‘Stretch 35‘ earlier that year, a small plastic and cardboard camera with a 12 exposure length of 35mm Kodacolor Gold 200 film, designed to be sent whole to the processors who would then return a set of 3.5 x 10 inch prints. I think the plastic camera could then be reloaded and provided with a new cardboard outer by Kodak.

“The lens was a 25mm f12 and I think plastic, but remarkably good for the time and almost sharp to the edges of the format, 36x14mm. The narrow images were in the centre of the film, with roughly 5mm left unexposed above and below the image.

“Controls there were none, except for the button to press, though there was a surprisingly reasonably accurate viewfinder. And a I think a counter to show how many frames remained. The shutter had only one speed, and looking at the negatives I’d guess it was around 1/100th of a second. You could only make pictures in reasonably bright sun.”

 

 

The ‘Stretch 35’ was a trend setter, with other companies following a similar model for single use cameras and also more sophisticated models. It launched a wave of interest in panoramic imagery. I suspect without this we would never have go the Hasselblad X-Pan which I bought some years later. The normal lens with this was not quite as wide as the Kodak, but considerably sharper and also produced a negative roughly three times as large.

“But the X-Pan only came years later in 1998. My work with the ‘Stretch 35’ did persuade me to buy a panoramic camera, the Widelux F8, though it took me a while to persuade myself to part with what seemed then a huge amount of money and buy this in 1991. Later there were others!”

 

 

The history of Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen

The first market was established on the fortifications of Saint-Ouen in 1870. Driven out of Paris, waste pickers came to settle on the other side of the “fortifs”. The rag pickers were a corporation of around 11,000 people who salvaged goods between midnight and 5am at the end of the 19th century.

Their “peu” market was set up between taverns, refreshment stalls, circuses and fairground stalls. In 1898, a regulation specified that a second-hand dealer was: “Reseller of old furniture, clothes, books, jewelry, dishes and other objects and merchandise of chance.”

At the turn of the 1960s and 70s, the flea markets supported almost 3,000  people, including 400 artisans living in Saint-Ouen or in the surrounding area, excluding merchants. The opening of the new markets – Cambo, Marché des Rosiers, Hall de la Brocante and Allée Verte – grew the area.

From 1985 to 1995, the regrouping of the Puces towards Porte de Clignancourt saw a few markets close: the Hall de la Brocante located on rue Lécuyer, the Allée Verte, Rue Jules Vallès and “les remises” on rue Lécuyer. Two new markets opened: “Malassis” reserved for Antiquarians was opened in 1989. And two years later, in 1991, the Dauphine Market opened.

The flea markets are the largest concentration of art dealers in the world (11,00 antique dealers, second-hand dealers and art galleries), which earned them the nickname “Grenier du Monde”.