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In Paris, Confined.

In Paris, Confined.

During the confinement I went out almost every morning for a walk and to buy some bread. I took my cameras with me. There was often beautiful sunshine. I like that low light and the way it shines on the buildings.

And on the streets,

A walk up the steps …

The street of the (alcoholic) artists

..and you could be sure that at that early hour, there would only be a few joggers. You didn’t see many people like myself.

Of course, no cafes or bars were open,

and the streets I liked to walk down were empty.

One thing you noticed quickly was that the signs and posters didn’t change. In the city we are used to continual change. The posters for the municipal elections held just before the lockdown started stayed up for weeks. I watched them slowly degrade with time. Mr. Campion is about the kind of person you would imagine him to be, based on this photograph. He is a Parisian attractions-park mogul and is responsible for all those tacky fake-wooden chalets you see around the city at Christmas.

In each arrondissement, his picture appears with an equally improbable figure (the local candidates).

You would find messages in the street sometimes, like this one: “thank-you rubbish-collectors”.

Or this one, helpfully written in English:

Of course there were always lost cats.

And dog-walkers.

Crossing the street was certainly easier.

It was a great relief when the parks finally opened after being closed for two months. We went right down to Montsouris on the morning that it had been opened. In some parts of the park, the grass hadn’t been cut for more than two months! Quite undheard of for a Parisian park.

Luxembourg was empty. It was lovely to hear bird-song coming from all around, and not just from the window.

We are not out of this thing yet. Now, today in Paris, because of holidays the city is even more empty. I hope I’ll be able to take some more pictures of people once again!

Leicaphilia moves the reading on the beam away from zero!

Leicaphilia moves the reading on the beam away from zero!

Thanks to a passing mention on my favourite philosophical corner of the internet photographic Universe the measurement on the beam has been moved away from zero (with a light fall, with lumps, at 5:30, as policeman Fox would say). But as these days I’m trying to keep to my promise of publishing at least one photograph per week with a short text does mean that my longer articles are swamped. So here’s small list…

Before leicaphilia moved the beam (in Zollverein)

Sergio Larrain and Valparaiso
Eugène Atget, his life
Atget’s legacy
Josef Koudelka at Beaubourg

I was happy to read that Film Ferrania have almost resolved their manufacturing problems. Shooting unique special films like their P30 emulsion is one of the best reasons I can think of to shoot film. Here’s my article about P30:

Discovering Ferrania’s P30 film

And about that film/digital thing? I think I still agree with most of this.

Thinking about photography…

More longer articles to come before the end of the summer, I hope. There’s Geoff Dyer’s excellent “The pleasure of looking at good photographs” which I mean to say something about…

52 Photographs (2018) #19: Discovering Chris Marker

52 Photographs (2018) #19: Discovering Chris Marker

I took a few photographs at the Chris Marker show at the Cinémathèque. I was particularly interested in the cabinet where photographs of Marker and his family were assembled. It was interesting to see them; as I mentioned in my article, Marker was a private individual. When asked for his photograph, we would invariably send a picture of his cat. So I certainly wanted to take a picture of this display. All those Chris Marker photographs in the same place! But there was a man who was examining the photographs very intently. After he heard the click of my shutter he turned to me and said, I am looking at these pictures so closely because this is my family! He explained that Marker’s family was essentially divided into the mother’s side and the father’s side, and the latter side didn’t care so much for art, culture and cinema. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Marker so rapidly changed his name. Anyway, this fellow was interesting character, and it was nice to talk to him.

Investigating the family of Chris Marker
52 Photographs (2018) #18: In St. Cloud, hommage to Atget

52 Photographs (2018) #18: In St. Cloud, hommage to Atget

After reading about Eugene Atget’s life I was more than little be interested to visit once again the parks and gardens he photographed in. They are almost all still there and have not changed much. In the last hundred years in Luxembourg gardens they have changed the chairs, but that’s about it.

St. Cloud is an interesting place. It’s easy to get to from here, around half an hour by bus from Porte d’Orleans. There was once a palace there which burned down during the Prussians war at the end of the 19th century. On one side there is the Seine; at the beginning of the 18th century this location was a favoured spot for country houses for rich Parisians. The village of St. Cloud today is quite picturesque. Unfortunately, today it hemmed in on all sides by motorways and elevated flyovers and one is never far from the rumble of traffic. But the park is still intact, and one can still walk rom the town to the park without crossing a motorway. Inside the park, in fact, one can walk for miles, and there are even forest trails, as much as one could hope for in the middle of an enormous city.

In St. Cloud

The statues that Atget photographed are still there. I brought with me a roll of slow, fine-grained film (still much faster than the film Atget used of course). I took pictures with my Leica. Certainly, there is no way a small portable camera such as a Leica can produce anything like an image from a heavy view camera, but at least there were no pixels involved, and I tried to imagine the photographs I was taking before I took them. There is still a special feeling in this park (I think I prefer it to Sceaux) and I’ll try to return there more often.

Read my two articles about Atget here and here.