Paris Exists Twice

I have the good fortune to live close to Paris.

Not in the city itself, but near enough to return often, with a camera, without needing a reason.

For a photographer, this is an immense privilege.

Not because Paris is beautiful. Many cities are.

But because Paris seems to exist twice:
in front of us, and already in the photographs that came before.

When I walk through its streets, I rarely feel I am looking at something untouched.

Other images are already there.

In 1838, on the Boulevard du Temple, Daguerre photographed a street that appears almost empty. The crowd was there, but the exposure was too long to retain it. Only a figure who remained still long enough seems to have stayed.

Later, Charles Marville photographed streets about to vanish under Haussmann’s transformations. A few decades on, Eugène Atget returned to façades, shopfronts, courtyards, passages — patiently, almost obstinately — as if trying to hold on to a city already slipping away.

Then, another city emerged.

The Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, seen by those who had come from elsewhere: Kertész, Brassaï, Man Ray. Night, shadows, reflections, cafés, bodies, chance encounters. Les années folles.

Not yet the postcard. Already a world of images.

Later still, the humanist photographers fixed one of its most enduring faces: tender, popular, romantic — instantly recognisable far beyond France.

This too remains.

Paris is already charged with images before we even lift the camera.

Living near it does not free me from that memory.

Perhaps it gives me time to move through it.

Paris is one of the most photographed places in the world.

Living near it may be a chance to move beyond the idea of “Paris”.

To return without a programme.

To let the postcard recede.

And to wait for something quieter to appear.

The photographs are gathered here:
Selected Works

This essay was first published on Medium in Full Frame.