This morning I would have been going up to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar to Paris for the photo show, but as I mentioned in my earlier post Paris Photo 2009, I’ve decided not to go.
So instead, I’m standing at my computer with an espresso and a croissant, mentally supplying the smell of stale smoke from Gauloises and the noisy traffic in the street outside and dreaming of the city. In my dream I’m in a very particular cafe, just a few minutes walk from the Rue de Rivoli where Paris Photo is held, and later in the day I’ll stroll through the passage across the street and into the Jardin du Palais Royal and down through there, out by the Theatre and across the square, untidy with traffic to wait at the crossing before descending the escalator into the basement depths of the Carrousel du Louvre and Paris Photo.
As in previous years it will be a fantastic show, and I’m sorry to be missing it, though I do find the venue a little difficult. I don’t think “I didn’t know I was agoraphobic until I went to Paris Photo” would be a good advertising slogan but it happens to be true so far as I’m concerned, and on my first visit I found myself rushing in panic for fresh air after a couple of hours in the depths.
So rather than go to Paris (and I will go again next year for the Mois de la Photo and Paris Photo if not before) I’ve decided to bring a little Paris into my life here and on the web.
Flea market, Paris, 1973
I don’t think I’ve written before here about my first published portfolio. In fact it only came back to me yesterday evening when I started thinking about this series of posts. Although I’d had an interest in photography from an early age (doubtless aided by the occasional image of scantily dressed young ladies that appeared in the Amateur Photographer which I devoured religiously every week at the local library as a teenager) and actually owned a real camera (a story for another time) since I was around 14, I only took up photography practically at the age of 25.
Paris at the start didn’t actually help in this, as on my first visit there in 1966 I dropped my camera – a Halina 35x – into the lake at Versailles as I was getting into a boat with my girl friend – and it was only recovered after quite a few minutes sitting on the bottom of that murky water. It never quite recovered despite careful cleaning, and the shutter gave random timings regardless of its setting but generally slower than 1/30s thanks to the rust on the shutter blades.
I visited Paris again in the summer of 1973 (by which time that girl friend was my wife) and we stayed an attic room in a huge mansion in the centre of Paris that was now a student hostel. We were broke, and walked the streets all day living on baguettes slit in half with a strip of dark chocolate or cheap cheese in the middle and cheap wine eaten in small squares as we followed the Guide Michelin walks around the grand and not so grand areas of Paris. In those days the walks in the guides were more detailed, and they were at least twice as long and twice as many as in modern editions.
Occasionally we treated ourselves to a plat du jour in the kind of cafe where French workmen eat and on rare occasions to one of the cheap tourist fixed price menus, but mainly we lived on bread, and eating as much as we could of it at the hostel breakfasts with jam and honey.
At night we staggered up four or five flights of the grandest staircase you can imagine (though rather less grand by the time you got to the top where our room was) and collapsed onto a bed lit by the dimmest imaginable of electric bulbs – more a nightlight than anything you could see by.
Memories are dim too, but it was one of our most enjoyable of holidays, and also for me the first time when I really got down to some serious photography; over the two weeks or so we were there I took around 20 films, probably more than I had taken altogether in the previous six months.
Fortunately by then I’d finally given up on the Halina 35x (a solid Hong Kong made viewfinder 35mm camera with a decent 45mm lens which sold for £7 13s. 3d in 1959 – but definitely not waterproof!)
I carried two cameras around Paris, one the tank-like Zenith B, an M42 Russian made screw-mount SLR with a 55mm f2 standard lens and my first telephoto, I think the surprisingly small Russian Jupiter-9 f2 85mm (like most Russian lenses, derived from “liberated” Zeiss designs.) It was a camera where everything was manual, and using it was hard labour. The Zenit had a lousy viewfinder for an SLR, dim and hard to focus, and winding on often required suprising force – and it was easy to accidentally rip a film from the cassette trying to wind on to frame 39.
As a contrast, also hanging around my neck was an Olympus SP, arguably one of the best fixed-lens rangefinders every, with automatic exposure, spot or centre-weighted metering and a fine 42mm f1.7 lens. YOu could also use the metering for manual exposure. Perhaps the only better camera of a similar type I’ve used is the Minolta CLE – one the best of the Leica M range – which is almost the same size.
After coming home I sent a dozen or so prints mainly from Paris to a photographic magazine. A few months later, picking up a copy at W H Smith’s I was delighted to find several of the pictures I sent reproduced with a short text as a portfoliom for which I received £25. This was my first real publication.
I’ve spent today adding around 25 pictures to the set from Paris in 1973 that were already on my smallest web site, peter-marshall.com. Later, probably tomorrow, I’ll put up some of the colour work I did in the city in the early 1980s.