Paris | >Re-PHOTO

Remembering Paris

For some years around this time of year I would be in Paris, visiting one of my favourite cities in November because of the huge ferment of photography across the city around the huge trade show of Paris Photo.

I first visited Paris in 1965 for a week in July staying at a student hostel on the outskirts with my future wife, and since then we returned every few years for a week or two in the summer, usually in August when most Parisians are on holiday away from the city. Two of my books on Blurb came out of these visits, In Search Of Atget and Photo Paris, with black and white images from 1984 and colour work from 1988 respectively.

You can see more of the work from Paris in several albums on Flickr – where there are a couple of albums from 1984 and another from 1988 as well as another small set from 2007. But you can see more on my own Paris Photos web site.

I think the first time I went to Paris Photo in November was in 2006, and you can see a set of pictures from my visit on line, but the accounts I wrote for a commercial web site of my visit and the shows I saw there is no longer available.

In 2007 I wrote about my visit for Paris Photo on My London Diary. It was the first time I had been in Paris on my own, though I did meet up with a few people, including my brother-in-law and quite a few photographers also there for Paris Photo. I arrived on the 13th November, just in time for the start of a transport strike, and my first full day there was November 14th 2007.

Paris was a little more difficult on my own, as my O Level French is more than rusty, but I did manage to buy myself breakfast at a café close to my hotel and read a newspaper, which told me there was a trade union protest by the transport workers taking place that afternoon.

I spent the morning walking around Paris before having a lunch at a self-service salad bar and then walking to Montparnasse where the protest was starting. It was a little different from protests in London as I commented in My London Diary, and there were times when my poor French made things difficult. The Leica M8 I was then using was not a great camera, and in particular had problems with colour because Leica had failed to realise its extreme infrared sensitivity needed cutting with a suitable filter on the sensor. Some of the images suffer from this and my failure to process them as well as I now could.

I left the protest as it appeared to be about to march off, and made my way to the opening session of Paris Photo, then at the Carrousel du Louvre, a venue “in the bowels of the earth under the Louvre.” As I commented, “It’s hard to contemplate a more depressing location, although relatively spacious outside the show. It would make a good location for some nasty shoot-em-up video game, sort of half-way between underground car park and shopping mall, a slightly cooler version of hell.”

There was much in the show I found unexciting – or worse, but as I commented, “Its a great opportunity to see almost the whole history of photography in a few days, a collection with much more depth than even the richest of museums – although with some great gaps, as many photographers produced very few prints and their work seldom comes up for sale.”

I went back in the following two days to visit Paris Photo again to see the whole of the show, but after a couple of hours there on the opening day, went with some photographer friends for a meal before walking back to my hotel. You can read more about the rest of my visit on My London Diary.

Elsewhere on My London Diary you can read a more lengthy account of my visit to Paris for Paris Photo in November 2008, November 2010 and November 2012. I’d chosen those even-numbered years because there were more photographic events happening in Paris outside the trade show on alternate years.

*Paris 2008* *– in the steps of Willy Ronis*

Looking back I’d astonished by the energy I appear to have had – and I think in one of them I went to see 87 other shows outside of Photo Paris in the few days I was there. But I was getting increasingly unhappy about Photo Paris itself, partly because so many of the dealers were showing much the same photographs every year and there seemed less and less new work of interest.

Armistice Day – November 11th

*Poppies in Trafalgar Square. 11 Nov 2006*

When I was young everything still stopped for two minutes at 11am on Armistice Day although the main remembrance events had been moved to Remembrance Sunday in 1939 so as not to interfere with the war effort. But traffic still pulled into the side of the road here. In France the Armistice de la Première Guerre mondiale is still a national holiday.

I’m not a pacifist, but I am firmly opposed to most wars, both historic and current. The First World War was clearly a disaster that should not have happened, a family quarrel that should not have resulted in such incredible suffering and loss of life largely with people killing others who they had far more in common with than with those who sent them into battle.

Clearly US war in Vietnam (and earlier the French in Indochina) was wrong as was the invasion of Iraq. And equally clearly we as a nation should not be wasting money on pointless nuclear weapons and selling arms to promote wars around the world such as that in Yemen. And so on.

Remembering Animals Killed in War, Park Lane, 11 Nov 2006

But while it seems clear that America should not have been fighting in Vietnam, it seems clear that the Vietnamese had to fight against them, just as it seems clear that Cubans were justified in fighting against Batista and US imperialism – and the same applies to other struggles against colonialism and for national liberation.

*School Students Against the War, Oxford St, 11 Nov 2006*

I’ve recently re-read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and although Stalinists contest his view of events it remains powerful both as a personal account of the war in Spain and makes clear the main reasons why the democratically elected government was defeated by the fascists – and Stalinist Russia’s contribution along with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to that defeat, which made a wider war inevitable. If you’ve not read it, this is a book I highly recommend – and there is an excellent article ‘Orwell and the Spanish Revolution‘ by John Newsinger in International Socialism Journal which explains Orwell’s position and deals with some of his detractors.

I grew up in the years following the Second World War and had my share as a wolf cub and boy scout of standing in short trousers with the bitter November wind blowing up them at Remembrance Sunday parades at local war memorials. Of course we should remember those who died, but not in the kind of militaristic and often jingoistic fashion that most or all such events have in England. The best way to honour their sacrifice is surely to work for peace. In Germany they have a day as a peace celebration.

*Families of Servicemen Killed in Iraq, Cenotaph, Whitehall. 11 Nov, 2006*

After briefly photographing the event at the Mairie in the 11th arrondissement – I’d rushed out from a café when I saw the event happening – we strolled the short distance to the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

*Père-Lachaise,* *Paris lle, 11 Nov 2008*

Paris 2010 (final)

After breakfast on Saturday we went for a walk, first making our way alongside the Metro Aerienne to La Rotonde de la Villette, one of my favourite Paris buildings, and then walking a little beside the canal, first to the north and then turning and going south to where there was a street photography show displayed as single images in each of a number of shop windows in the streets around the Rue de Lancry. It was a nice idea, but not really much of a way to display photographs, though we did enjoy the hunt for them. See more about the exhibition and the wedding here on >Re:PHOTO and more photographs in my diary at Street Photography in the 10e.

Of course I was taking pictures, and for a short while became an unofficial wedding photographer, though I turned down an opportunity to join the party as we had other things to do.

The largest photographic event taking place in Paris was not the dealer show Paris Photo, nor even the Mois de la Photographie, though that had the most prestigious shows, but the fringe, the Mois de la Photo-Off. This is a well organised event, with a free booklet listing the many events accepted for it (and there is also a fringe of the fringe with many other photography shows), but also a series of organised tours around the shows in different areas of Paris on each Saturday afternoon in November.

Photographer Loïc Trujillo (left) talks with Neil Atherton, Commissaire General of the Mois de la Photo-OFF, who led the tour, in Galerie Impressions

On November 20th we had a choice of two areas, and picked ‘Beabourg’, going to eight shows and meeting the photographer or gallerist at all but one of them. We spent around 15-20 minutes in each gallery before walking the short distance to the next. At times it was rather taxing on my hazily remembered ‘O’ Level French, and I was pleased to have my interpreter with me. You can read more about the shows on the tour in two posts here, Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 1 and Photo-Off – A Guided Tour – 2, and again there are more pictures in my diary.

We had to hurry away at the end of the tour to change and meet Linda’s brother and his wife for a dinner in one of Paris’s institutions, Chartier. It has become a must for tourists and it’s best to go early to avoid a long queue.

I spent Sunday morning at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and you can read about what I saw there in Sunday Worship at the MEP, though there are no illustrations as photography is forbidden there. Linda chose instead to attend the culte at the Temple de l’Oratoire du Louvre, and we met afterwards for lunch, buying some delicious slices of quiches and cakes on the rue St Antoine and sitting and eating them on a bench out of the light rain in the Place des Vosges.

Afterwards we wandered aroung the Marais, visiting several shows open on a Sunday afternoon, including ten Swedish photographers of the collective Tio Fotgrafer and A Few Shows in the 4e, before making our way across the Seine to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), to view France 14, the work of 14 younger photographers selected by Raymond Depardon, and then another Metro ride to FIAP Jean Monnet in the 14e, to view a show celebrating 40 years of women’s liberation. And then it was time for dinner and to return to our hotel and rest. There are more photographs from the afternoon in my diary at The Marais and BnF and FIAP.

We had a day before catching our Eurostar back to London on Monday evening for a final walk, rather more relaxed than in the previous days with hardly a visit to a photographic exhibition. You can see the pictures at Monday Wandering and read a little more about the walk at Monday in Paris.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Paris 2010 (continued)

On Friday 19th November I rushed from lunch to make my final visit to Paris Photo, mainly to attend the launch of the book Lab East, showcasing 30 young photographers and to take a few pictures. You can read what I thought about the book and a few of the contributions in Paris Photo – Lab East, probably written in my hotel room late at night, which perhaps excuses the fact that I got the title of the book wrong twice (now corrected.)

I have mixed feelings about Blurb, and the post I wrote perhaps reflects that. Print on demand is I think an important part of photographic publishing, and one that puts control back into the hands of the photographer which I’m very much in favour of, but there are two great problems which I feel Blurb has failed to address. The first is simply cost – and I think better technology (and lower profit margins) could do much to decrease this, and the second is distribution.

There were just a few more stalls at Paris Photo to visit, and I did so before leaving. It is a huge show, and I feel sorry for anyone who tries to make just a single visit, as many paying visitors do. Fortunately with a press pass I was able to make a number of shorter visits and still see all I wanted to see. But there was far more happening outside the Paris Photo exhibition halls, and I left and strolled through the Jardin du Carrousel admiring the naked women (only sculpture) and walked beside the Seine to the Pont des Arts and across to the Institut De France to view the impressive landscape show by Thibaut Cuisset, which again I wrote about here, along with a little of my own work in More Paris – French Landscapes. Leaving this I called in at a number of small galleries in the area, some of which were taking part in the Mois de la Photo or it’s fringe, L’Off, before meeting my wife as arranged in St Germain.

We were on the Left Bank for a reason, as this evening around 30 galleries were keeping open until 7pm, listed in a leaflet Photo Saint-Germain-Des-Prés, and we visited most of them, though we needed a brief rest in a café too. I wrote about some of them here in Parcours Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and there are more pictures from my afternoon and early evening walk in my diary at To Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

We took the Metro back to the north of Paris and after dinner took the funicular in Montmatre for a walk around. It was late and many places were shut and there were relatively few people were around. A bus came along and we jumped on it, getting a tour of the area and fortunately it took us to Place Pigalle, from where we walked along the backstreets and back to our hotel on the edge of the 10e. Pictures at Montmartre at Night.

…to be continued

Paris 2010

Ten years ago today I was in Paris, having arrived there for Paris Photo two days earlier on Wednesday 17th, where after queing to get my accreditation I attended the opening of the event. I didn’t much enjoy it – too many reminders that I wasn’t a VIP and too many cliques around most of the gallery stands, though I did meet just a few old friends in the crowds.

But it was too crowded and too hot and I was pleased to leave early and meet my wife for a rather good meal in a Latin Quarter restaurant and then a short walk around the centre of Paris before taking the Metro to our hotel room in the Goutte-d’Or. You can read more about my initial thoughts on the show in a long blog here on >Re:Photo, and there are a few more pictures on My London Diary.

Thursday after breakfast and a short move to another hotel there was plenty of time to take a leisurely walk and some photographs on my way to Paris Photo which opened at 11am.

The pictures I made on the walk are I think rather more interesting than those inside Paris Photo, and a couple of hours inside the show were enough for the day – and I wrote about it at some length for readers of >Re:PHOTO, as well as a more general piece Thoughts on Paris Photo.

I met my wife for a pleasant lunch and then we began a tour of photo exhibitions in the 3e – and I wrote about some of them here, as well as taking more pictures on our walk.

The highlight of our day was the opening of Brian Griffin’s The Black Country, and again I posted a lengthy piece here on >Re:PHOTO.

We finished the day at a fine Party, hosted by Jim and Millie Caspar of Lensculture in their flat on the rue Saint Antoine, and after a few glasses of champagne I couldn’t stop myself taking more pictures. There was also a room set up as a studio where all the guests were invited to take photographs of themselves. On this site I mainly talk about the technical details, but there are again more pictures in my diary.

We had to leave early at around 11.30 to take the Metro back to our hotel, but the party was still going strong. I slept well that night after a long day, and the following morning was out again for another wander around Ménilmontant and Belleville in the north-east of the city until lunchtime. Again you can see more on >Re:PHOTO and in my diary.

I’ll end with a picture I took in Paris Photo (there are more online.) The face reflected in the towel-holder looks rather as if a man is wearing a mask (or just a gag), though it is just a label. As I walked into the toilettes pour hommes another photographer was taking his self-portrait in the rather fancy mirrors.

(to be continued in a later post)

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Montreuil, Paris

Montreuil is of course not Paris, not inside the old walls or the modern municipality, but a commune at its eastern edge, only four miles from the centre of Paris, an ancient settlement now separated from the city by its modern wall, the Boulevard Périphérique.

Montreuil, Paris 1988 88-8f-12-Edit_2400

I don’t now recall exactly where we stayed, somewhere a short walk from Robespierre (the Metro Station not the man) and just a little further from the RER at Vincennes.

Montreuil, Paris 1988 88-8f-34-Edit_2400 — Rue Douy Délcupe, Montreuil,

Long before the days of Airbnb we had leased a flat from a colleague of my brother-in-law’s wife who had gone south for a month in a gîte for August – like most of Paris. It was a spacious flat for its usual single occupant, but a little cramped for our family of four, and while the boys shared a bed, we slept on a mattress on the floor, which was comfortable enough.

Most days I went out for a walk before breakfast to buy bread and sometimes croissants, often with one of my sons, and always with a camera. Many of the bakers were closed for August and others took it in turns to be open for a week, making some of these walks a little longer, and I often diverted down streets that looked interesting.

Montreuil, Paris 1988 88-8f-15-Edit_2400

We also went for family walks around the area, though on the first Monday of our visit went to a photo-booth to get portraits for the boys to get them their ‘Carte Orange (we still had cards from a previous visit) and then bought our ticket for what seemed a ridiculously cheap week of travel on the Metro system – I think little more than the cost of a day travelcard in London.

Montreuil / Vincennes, Paris 1988 88-8g1-64-Edit_2400

Once equipped with these we spent most of our time in Paris, but still occasionally walked around Montreuil on our way back to the flat or after our evening meal there rather than return to the city.

Montreuil, Paris 1988 88-8f-11-Edit_2400

There are more pictures of Montreuil and other places in and around Paris in the album ‘Around Paris 1988‘ and clicking on the pictures above will take you to a larger version in the album, from where you can browse them others. The images here all come from the first day or two we were staying there and are all a short walk away from the flat. I’ll feature some more in later posts.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Missing Paris

I’m missing Paris. My first visit there was in 1966, when I spent a week or two in a Protestant student hostel a few miles south of the centre with my future wife – though in separate double rooms, each with another of the same sex – and students from around the mainly Francophone world. After breakfast each day we took the train for the short journey to the Left Bank and spent the day as tourists in the city and nearby attractions, though mainly just walking around the city as we were both still penniless students.

We lunched outdoors in parks and squares, buying baguettes and stuffing them with chocolate or pate as we couldn’t afford cafes or bars, eating cheap fruit for afters. We went out of Paris to Versailles, where I managed to drop my camera in the lake as we climbed into a boat to row around the lake. The boatman fished it out and handed it back to me as we got out of the boat, rather obviously expecting a reward, but all I could afford was my thanks. The camera never worked reliably after that, and it was five years before I could afford to replace it.

We returned to the hostel for an evening meal, which introduced me to some very strange dishes – and I think one evening as a special treat we were given a kind of horsemeat stew; it tasted fine, but I’ve never sought to repeat the experience. After dinner we crowded into a room with the rest of the inhabitants to watch the games of the World Cup, though I’d gone home before the final.

Quai de Jemappes / Rue Bichat, 10e, Paris, 1984

It was some years before we could afford another foreign holiday – we’d spent our honeymoon in Manchester with a day trip to the Lake District, a visit to Lyme Park and some walks around Glossop. But in 1973 we were back for a couple of weeks in Paris, this time at a hostel in the centre and sharing a room. We took with us the Michelin Guide (in French) and I think followed every walk in the book, which took us to places most tourists never reach – it was then much more thorough than the later English versions.

In 1973 I had two cameras with me. A large and clunky Russian Zenith B with its 58mm f/2 Helios lens and a short telephoto, probably the 85mm f2 Jupiter 9, but also the more advanced fixed lens rangefinder Olympus SP, with its superb 42mm f1.7 lens, a simple auto exposure system as well as full manual controls. I needed my Weston Master V exposure meter to work with the Zenith. You can see more of the photographs I took on my Paris Photos web site. Some of these pictures were in my first published magazine portfoliolater in 1973.

It was a while before we returned to Paris, though we went through it by train on our way to Aix-en-Provence and on bicycles from between stations on our way to the Loire Valley in the following couple of years. Then came two children, and it was 1984 before we returned to the city with them when I came to photograph my ‘Paris Revisited‘ a homage to one of the great photographers of Paris, Eugene Atget, which you can see in the Blurb Book and its preview as well as on my Paris Web site.

Placement libre-atelier galerie, Paris 2012

We returned to the city several times later in the 1980s and 1990s, and more regularly after 2000, when I went in several Novembers for a week, usually with my wife, to visit the large Paris Photo exhibition as well as many other shows which took place both as a part of the official event and its fringe. One week there I went to over 80 exhibitions, including quite a few openings.

La Villette, Canal St Martin, 19e, Paris 1984-paris285 — 1988

But the last time I was in Paris was in November 2012. Partly because Paris Photo changed and there seemed to be less happening around it in the wider city than in previous years. We’d planned to go in 2015 but were put off by Charlie Hebdo shooting and later the November terrorist attack. More attacks in 2018 also put us off visiting France, but we’d promised ourselves a visit to Paris in 2020 – and then came the virus.

While I’ve been stuck at home since March, I have been visting France virtually, going back to my slides taken in 1974 in the South of France, of our ride up the Loire Valley in 1975 and of Paris in 1984, all of which are now on Flickr. Most recently I’ve returned to Paris in 1988, with over 300 black and white pictures from Paris and some of its suburbs.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Paris, Me and Willy Ronis

I’ve long been a fan of Willy Ronis (1910-2009) and in particular his pictures of Paris, particularly of the working-class areas of the north-east of the city, and have on several occasions written about him and the pictures I’ve taken on walks around the same areas as him. When in 2008 I was given a copy of his ‘La Traversée de Belleville’ at Le Bar floréal, published by them for his exhibition there in 1990, I found that I had already walked all of the streets on his route – though that didn’t stop me doing so again.

It’s now some years since I last went to Paris, and every time I look at http://peter-marshall.com my pictures of the city which I first visited in 1966 I feel the urge to go again.

Like most of a certain age and medical condition I’m still more or less banged up at home, though going out for walks and bike rides avoiding so far as possible any close contact with others apart from my wife. So unfortunately I won’t be going to Paris in the next month and so will miss the exhibition of 100 photos by Ronis at the galerie Argentic from October 3-17 2020 which I read about in The Eye of Photography a couple of days ago.

Instead I’ll take the few books of his work I have down from my shelves and browse through them to renew my memory of his work. And perhaps read again some of the posts I’ve made that mention him, including Retour en Lorraine, bar Floréal & Willy Ronis and the shortened version of my essay on him from 2003 that I republished in a post on the occasion of his death in 2009.

Here I’ve posted a few of my own pictures of Paris, very different from the work of Ronis which you can see a good selection of at the Peter Fetterman gallery. There is a video of an interesting talk by Matthieu Rivallin about his life at Hong Kong University, as well as many other short videos about him and his work available on line.

More of my own pictures of Paris at Paris Photos.

Reporters Associés

The Eye of Photography has just published a series of articles by Louis Le Roux (in English translation) about the Paris photo agency Reporters Associés, founded in 1953. Le Roux joined them as a lab worker a few months later and eventually became the head of the agency, one of first generation which pioneered the “French photojournalism” of the second part of the 20th century, serving the rise of magazines such as Paris Match, Stern, Jours de France…

In part one of the five part series he brings to life some of the problems of working at the time, starting with a primitive darkroom around the same size as my own boxroom darkroom at home, and with the same lack of facilities, without running water or sink, though in a much grander house on Avenue Frochot.

The second part looks in detail at Lova de Vaysse, real name was Vladimir-Lev Rychkoff-Taroussky (1921- 1983), the boss of the agency.

Part 3, The Fifties of the Rolleiflex, looks at the change from the press cameras using glass plates to film-based photography and some of the reportages carried out by the agency as well as giving some details about materials and storage of negatives and prints.

The fourth part of the series looks at the Agency’s peak in the 1960s when it covered all major events and a rapid change to 35mm took place, at first with Leicas and then Pentax, Canon and Nikon SLRs. While the square format of the Rollei meant that virtually all images were cropped in the darkroom, Le Roux comments “There will be less and less need to crop photos. The framing will be done directly by the photographers thanks to the change of lens. Besides, photographers don’t really like having their shots cropped.” And finally the agency got a proper modern darkroom and had to begin to cope with the move to colour.

In the final part Le Roux talks about some of the photographers who worked with the agency in the 1960s, and about the loss of their contract with Stern. Many of the best photographers were leaving to join newer agencies such as Gamma, and Le Roux, seeing the agency had no future he resigned. Two months later it was bankrupt.

It’s a well illustrated insider’s story into a period of great change in photojournalism, and well worth reading.

My old slides

I took my first colour pictures years before I was a photographer. I’d long had an interest in photography, assiduously reading Amateur Photographer from cover to cover in the local library each week and around the age of 13 had saved pennies from my very limited pocket money each week, finally managing to buy a Halina 35x, which looked like a real camera. But it was around 4 years later that I could afford to buy my first film and send it away for processing, an Ilford black and white film which was returned with 36 postcard-size deckle-edge lustre prints, mainly of ancient oak trees in Richmond Park, though one of my father in our back garden in tie and cardigan uneasily holding a garden fork still adorns an oval hole in one of those family composites put together by my wife on our landing.

But the second film I took, I think the following year, was Agfa colour transparency. Most or all of it was taken of a girlfriend, an aspiring model, sitting in a blossom covered peach tree (grown from a stone) again in our back garden. I’m not sure if any have survived and the romance certainly didn’t, perhaps largely because as a penniless student I didn’t have a sports car and couldn’t take her to clubs, restaurants and pubs like the older men she met.

For the next few years I was a film a year man, a roll of colour transparencies taken on holidays and outings. I did take a couple of rolls of black and white when still a penniless student, but my photography was rather more curtailed when I dropped the camera in the lake at Versailles on my first overseas holiday, a week in a student hostel on the outskirts of Paris with my future wife. Fished out after some minutes underwater it never worked reliably again, the leaf shutter closing when it felt like it rather than following the set speed.

Around five years later I could afford to replace it with a cheap Russian SLR, and by then I’d also taken a short darkroom course and was living in a flat where I could set up a temporary darkroom in the kitchen to develop film and make black and white prints and my photography really began. But I continued to take the occasional colour slide film, mainly still for holidays. And by the time I really began photography seriously I was usually carrying two camera bodies, one with black and white and the second colour film.

Until 1985, all of that colour film was transparency film, partly because at that time most publications would only accept slides, and I aspired to have my pictures published event if they seldom where. Most of it, largely on cost grounds, was in those early years taken on film which used the E3 process, and it hasn’t aged well. E4 which replaced it towards the end of the ’70s has done better and what little Kodachrome I took (it was more expensive) best of all. Of course my slides have been stored in far from ideal conditions at home which will have accelerated their ageing.

Thanks to the Covid lockdown, I have managed to complete the scanning of all those slides which I can find which seem worth scanning. A few in the past were scanned on a proper film scanner at around 20 minutes per image; a few years ago I found I could get acceptable results from my Epson 750PRO flatbed (though only by not using its automatic location which crops unacceptably) but have now found a bellows and macro-lens much faster and better. Retouching to remove spots and mould can still be time-consuming, and I’ll only do this when I need to use the images. I’ve found little if any gain in cleaning the slides other than with an air blower – and using cleaning fluids and cloths seems to make those in card mounts even dirtier.

At the end of last month I wrote a little about a cycle ride up the Loire valley with some pictures on Kodachrome from 1975. The pictures in this post are from Paris in 1973 and have survived better than most I took in the early years. You can see them larger by right-clicking and choosing to open them in a new tab.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.