There is a reason why I make photographic images of Paris in black and white. Yes, I know, Paris is a colorful city and her colors are beautiful, yet what I love Paris for is her soul and that is something that you can only feel, not see. Worse, an ugly soul can sometimes hide behind a beautiful facade, just as a beautiful soul can be hidden behind an ugly exterior. To see a soul needs experience, a closeness and intimacy over a period of time. It requires getting past the exterior be it beautiful or not so beautiful. Oscar Wilde was telling us this when he wrote “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Externally, Dorian Gray was a handsome young man and retained that appearance over an impossibly long time while leading a secret life of decadence and evil. During this time a portrait painted by his friend Basil Hallward remains hidden in locked room, growing more and more ugly with each of Dorian's trespasses. The portrait is an abstraction of his ugly, evil soul. A black and white photograph is an abstraction (we don't see the world in black and white) that records a visual experience. A color photograph, because of its colors, pretends to reproduce the visible. This scene on blvd St Michel, actually captured in less than a second, took years to acquire the inner beauty that Paris is showing us. The tables contain thousands of books, in a neighborhood that has been a center of books and publishing for scores of years. The books are cheap, reminding me of the poor students and artists and writers that have lived and studied and worked here. They were here to experience the inner beauty of this city whose exterior is sometimes shabby while hiding a beautiful soul.
