A Child in Paris

Paris is known as the city of Lights and as the city of Romance but she is also a city for children, the little kind and the big kind. Being a child in Paris is not a question of age, it's a mental state. You can be old and still be open the way a child is when playing. You can delight in the sounds around you. Dishes and silverware clacking in a café, an espresso machine snorting, waiters calling out orders to the kitchen, children at play, especially in the Jardin des Tuileries, can all start your imagination on a journey back to your childhood when everything was new and fresh and wonderful. You only have to be open to it.

Sunday afternoon in the Tuileries is a great place to recapture these childhood feelings, to experience them again through the radiant faces of the little ones and, perhaps, to feel like a child again. As you watch the proud parents rent 10 franc boats (these days 2 euro boats) from the vendor's cart you wish you were a child again. Around the edge of the fountain each bright eyed child has a wooden sailboat, a stick, and an anxious parent trying to keep up. The boats skim across the fountain driven by a pleasant spring breeze and are occasionally prodded back to the center of the fountain with a stick and a gleeful shout. The children want to independent and resist all efforts of parental help but occasionally look around to make sure Mère or Père is still there watching.

Some children have radio controlled battery operated boats and a hovering father who looks a lot happier.  The child is usually looking more at the other kids than at his own complicated toy. Enjoyments in Paris are best experienced when simple – a glass of wine, a quiet café, or a simple wooden boat and a stick are all you need to be a child again in Paris.

Saved by the cat!

Sometimes, even in the face of incredible beauty you can become so involved with yourself that the beauty fades from view, you walk through it unaware. If you have ever ignored a pretty girl you know to what lengths she will go to get your attention back. Paris is like that. One morning, on a mission to find the perfect book at Gibert Joseph, engrossed in my own thoughts as I walked along rue de la Bûcherie, I looked up to see this extraordinary scene. I didn't see it evolve, I just stumbled into it.

Simone de Beauvoir once lived on this street, in fact pretty much right here. I should have been paying attention and the fact that I have walked this street hundreds of times is no excuse. There were voices to hear and details to contemplate. This is a narrow street with little room. I don't know how the ladder got here or why the cat needed rescuing or if was me that needed rescuing from sleep walking in such a place. There were no trucks in sight to explain the ladder, the men doing the rescuing were not in any official capacity, and the cat didn't look happy. Paris had once again grabbed me and pulled me to her, “Don't you dare ignore me!” she said.

I vowed never again to avert my gaze into this city with all of her charms and beauty knowing fully that I would do it again and that Paris would find some way to catch me and pull me back into the scene.

Passages

Paris is a place where things keep happening, repeating in familiar patterns. It is this repetition that gives Paris power and makes her a living place. Paris draws power and intelligence and art from these repetitions. Her structure, patterns of activity, her unique beauty, are a result of all that happens there. The “slices” of Paris in my images represent only a few instants in the life of a centuries old city that I want to believe will sustain these patterns, retain her vitality, for a long, long time.

Here is someone in Pasage Joufrey. This photography studio has been here since I first started coming to Paris and it was old then. It was never open, not once. I would look through the window at the faded prints and the leather bellows of ancient, dusty, cameras. All that is gone now, replaced by a more modern shop that is always open but the old prints are still in the bins for you and me to look through and to imagine stories from.

Look again, when do you think he might have been there? Last week, last year, last decade, last century? Who knows and more to the point, does it matter? He is looking through old photographs. Does he feel, as I do, connected in time to the places and faces in those old images? As soon as he is done I will take his place. I won't disturb him now, let him dream. I will have plenty of time when he's gone and the magic of Paris is that someone will replace me when I have moved on. As long as there is Paris there will be someone here in Passage Joufrey, dreaming and searching.

My task, one I have taken on with joy, is to create images for future generations of lovers of Paris to excite their dreams and awaken their passions with images of the now which will someday be the past. Timeless, not in the content of the image but in its inherent timelessness of spirit.

Sunday morning in Paris

Paris is quiet on a Sunday morning in December. I feel an inner peace walking along blvd St Germain and up the hill on blvd St Michel towards Luxembourg Gardens. There is little traffic and fewer people, even at 11 o'clock in the morning. Like a pretty girl, Paris is always surrounded by a crowd but this morning I am alone with her. Le Rostand, just opposite the entrance to the Gardens, is my Sunday café. Sometimes I take a table by the window overlooking the terrace, sometimes a table in the back by the fireplace, depending on my mood and the weather. There is always a choice this early on Sunday morning. Later, families will begin showing up, everyone dressed nicely for a leisurely lunch. At this hour, there are only one or two lonely souls sitting at tables along the back wall writing, reading, or working on a laptop, once upon a time smoking. Even though smoking is no longer allowed, the color of the walls at Le Rostand is a dark, smokey yellow that retains the atmosphere of days gone by.

I am comfortable here, especially when it is cold and damp outside. I will linger for an hour or so over a plate of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and maybe a glass or two of sancerre as the café fills up. I love listening to the conversations around me. Paris is not just streets and parks and museums and monuments, she is also the people who live here and the experiences they have. In Paris, people meet and entertain friends more often in cafés than at home. A few tables away a girl cry cries quietly while her boyfriend explains why he won't be seeing her anymore. A little boy runs up to my table to show me the toy he just got for his birthday, another couple plans their day. Before I could understand these conversations I was a stranger here.

In a few minutes I will walk across rue Vaugirard and stroll along the iron fence around Luxembourg Gardens looking at the picture exhibition that is always there. Eventually, reluctant to leave the day,  I stroll back towards the Seine, through Buci market and back to Place St Michel and rue Maître Albert. Another Sunday in Paris, familiar enough to be comforting, new enough to be interesting.

The Girl on the Quai

I capture an image with my camera in 1/100th of a second. All that has gone on before and all that will happen after has to fit in that tiny slice of frozen time. The instants I have recorded on film in 11,000 negatives over 20 some odd years add up to just under 2 minutes. Not much time at all. You have to be present or these fleeting moments will go by unnoticed.

Paris is like that, she winks at you, flashes a smile, and then turns away. You either get it or you don't. Sometimes I get lucky.

Walking on île St Louis on a gray cold morning, approaching Quai de Bourbon from rue le Regrattier, I heard a woman call out. I had a feeling Paris was about to reveal to me one of those definitive moments. I raised my camera to capture this school girl running on the cobblestones. It was not a unique moment. Perhaps this girl could have just run past Rodin on his way from a visit with Camille Claudel at her studio up the street. Not much would be different. Maybe had I been just a bit earlier I could have seen Emile Zola sitting on the wall of the Quai thinking about the opening lines of a new novel, or perhaps I might have seen Baudelaire making his way home.

Lately I have taken to walking in Paris without my camera. It helps me to stay present, absorbed in what is going on around me. It gives me confidence that Paris will to continue to flirt with me and show me something I should see. Tomorrow is soon enough to capture one of these moments - some days I just live them.

Temps Pass

Time, in Paris, has a different quality than time anywhere else. In Paris the practical world disappears for me. I no longer think about time. I know each visit will end, I just don't believe it.

For the last 20 some odd years I have strolled, more or less aimlessly, through the streets of Paris absorbing details and impressions until they have become a part of my being. No longer remembering where or when these impressions, these tiny slices of time, became mine. The profile of a pretty girl turning a corner and disappearing, the smell and taste and heat of warm lobster bisque in a small café on a cold day, the sun on my face in Luxembourg Gardens on a warm spring day, and thousands of other impressions that are all mine now, like these old paintings and artifacts in a shop window on Avenue Daumesnil.

 I carry my camera with me and record the things that call to me. In the early days I went out looking for pictures. It was never any good. I made a lot of clichés and I was not seeing Paris. I was seeing her reputation and forcing it onto my film like a tourist. It was only when I became a flâneur, walking around Paris with my eyes open, seeing instead of looking, that Paris started to be mine. She began whispering to me: "Look here, this is what I am.", inviting me in at last. I had misunderstood time, trying, like Cartier-Bresson, to capture the decisive moment instead of understanding that what moved me in Paris were the definitive moments, those things that happen over and over again until they become the very fabric of life in Paris. It is these images that define the culture and meaning of Paris that I share with you.

The Welcome Tree

Paris is more of a presence in my life than a place. For the last 25 years I have spent time there, mostly long stays of 3 or 4 weeks. Strung together it probably amounts to two or three years. I have rented the same apartment on rue Maître Albert for the last 15 of those years. In many ways it feels more like home than Baltimore where I wait between Paris trips.

Each arrival in Paris is like a continuation of the last visit. Rather than remembering Paris it is a if I'm forgetting Baltimore. The time between compresses until it vanishes, as if on my last morning in Paris I walked up to Place Maubert to get a taxi to the airport but changed my mind at the last second and continued up rue Monge to the Keyser boulangerie and now I'm walking home with my warm baguette and a new day in Paris in front of me.

Paris is the place where I feel most present. I relate to the city in a physical way - sound  and touch and smell. Yes, I see it as well and in fact record a lot of what I see on film but when I close my eyes and think about my experiences in Paris I hear it and feel it and smell it. When things in ordinary life remind me of Paris it is never the visual but rather the sounds and textures and smells that carry my thoughts.

One of the first things I do on each visit is walk the short distance to Notre Dame. Just inside the back gate, nearest the river, to the gardens behind the cathedral are four trees arranged in a square and one of them has become a symbol for me of my relationship with Paris. It has been oddly grafted in a way that makes it seem animated in a welcoming way. It is very much how I feel in Paris, grafted on, not born here but taking nourishment from its cultural soil. My tree has rough bark with deep crevices and as I rub my hand along its roughness, that texture on my hand welcomes me again to Paris.