In Search of Atget

Paris and the Nouvelle Vague

Paris and the Nouvelle Vague: Pictures from my own work in Paris over the years and a short review of a current show online and at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, California.

I first photographed in Paris in 1966, before I was really a photographer, when I spent a week there with the woman I was to marry two years later. I had bought a 36 exposure process-pad cassette of cheap slide film for the holiday, loading it into my fixed lens Halina camera.

Getting into a rowing boat to row at Versailles I dropped my camera into the lake. The man hiring the boats fished around a little with his boat hook, then waved us off, promising to continue the search. When we came back an hour later he proudly presented it, obviously hoping for a reward. But we were penniless students and all he got were profuse thanks.

The camera was never the same again with a leaf shutter that would sometimes stick open – and it was six years before I could afford to replace it. The colour slides had an interesting hue.

Our next trip to Paris was in 1973, when we spent several weeks in a student hostel in the centre of Paris and spent long days walking almost every walk in an old Michelin Green Guide. I’d given the Halina away and now had a clunky Russian Zenith with three Russian lenses and a good supply of bulk loaded cassettes of black and white film.

You can see many of the pictures from that visit on my Paris Photos web site along with those from some later visits, particularly in 1984 when I worked on the project that became my show and later a book, In Search Of Atget. After that we returned every two or three years until fairly recently, and pictures from some of the later visits – mainly for Paris Photo – are also online.

Peter Fetterman Gallery
Nouvelle Vague

SEPTEMBER 6, 2025 – JANUARY 3, 2026
Santa Monica, California

I seldom write reviews of photographic exhibitions now, either of shows I go to or those I simply see on line. Mostly because few interest me and those that do are mainly of work by photographers who I’ve written about at length in the past (though many of those that I wrote professionally are no longer available.)

But this show attracted me, both as a photographer and also as someone who now watches (or falls asleep watching) a wide range of films. I first got a real interest in film back in the 1960s and the films that excited me most were those of the French New Wave, particularly Truffaut and Godard, but later others including Chabrol, Rivette and Varda. And of course a great fan of photographers such as Willy Ronis and Robert Doisneau, and finally as someone who has enjoyed many stays in Paris over the years, at times immersing myself in its thriving photographic culture during the Mois de la Photo, so different and more intense than anything in London. And this is a show which is much more about Paris than about the Nouvelle Vague.

You can see pictures from the show on the Peter Fetterman Gallery website.

Raymond Cauchetier who died from Covid in 2021 at the age of 101 worked as a set photographer on many of the best-known films of the French “early New Wave period, including Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) and La peau douce (1964), Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961) and Jacques Rozier’s superb but overlooked Adieu Philippine (1962).” Jonathan Romney, wiriting in the BFI’s Sight and Sound could have included many others, notabley À bout de souffleand ‘Une femme est une femme‘.

A former member of the French Resistance he spent much of the 1950s photographing in South East Asia including in the war in Vietnam, Japan and Hong Kong and it was in Cambodia where he first worked as a set photographer.

He failed to get work as a photojournalist after returning to France but when working on photo-romans was introduced to the then film critic Jean-Luc Godard who hired him as set photographer for his debut film, ‘À bout de souffle‘ in 1960. Cauchetier also worked on his ‘Une femme est une femme‘.

He left the world of cinema a few years later in 1968 as the pay for set photographers was too low, but it was apparently only in 2005 when French copyright law was clarified that he was able to exhibit and publish much of his work from those 8 years. In France, unlike the UK, USA and most other countries, photographers retain copyright of their work even when they are working as employees.

It was good to see the Peter Fetterman Gallery highlighting his work in their new exhibition, Nouvelle Vague, which they call “a compelling survey of French photography drawn from some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century“.

And the show on-line does have some interesting images by some of the better known French photographers of the era, including Edouard Boubat, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis and Sabine Weiss, mainly from an earlier age in the 1940s and 1950s along with a few pictures which just happened to have been taken in Paris by others. And although Henri Cartier-Bresson just had to be there, he is hardly well represented.

Of those who are not French the work of Louis Stettner – who went to Paris in 1947 for three weeks and stayed five years stands out. And he arguably played an important part in bringing the ideas and approaches of New York’s Photo League with him. But there are some whose presence seems to me to simply dilute the show.

More of my own work on Paris on my Paris Photos web site, and in my books In Search Of Atget and Photo Paris available from Blurb, as well as in several albums on Flickr including Paris 1997. I really should do more books on my work in Paris.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Peter Marshall’s Paris

Peter Marshall’s Paris. Bastille Day seems a suitable time to write a little again about my photographs of Paris, a city in and around which I’ve spent some time over the years, though always as a visitor rather than a resident.

I first went there in 1966, going to spend a week in a student hostel with a young woman from Hull who I was madly in love with, so definitely seeing the city through rose-tinted lenses, though a little of the shine was taken off by dropping my camera in the lake where we went rowing at Versailles. The camera never really worked properly again, though I couldn’t afford to replace it for another six years.

I think that was probably the only time I’ve been in France for Bastille Day, and we spent the evening at the celebrations in a town square a few miles south of the city centre where our hostel was located. It was very definitely full accordion and dancing and entirely French, but although I remember taking a few pictures there, its probably fortunate that no trace of them remains. People like Doisneau did it so much better.

It was not until 1973 that I returned, with the same woman who was now my wife and with a couple of cheap Russian cameras, A Zenit (Zenith) B SLR, heavy and clunky and a smaller Russian rangefinder camera, I think a Zorki 4. This time we stayed at a student hostel in the Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau in the 1st Arrondisement, which had a grand staircase up to the first floor and a rather less grand one to our room on an upper story, up which we dragged ourselves after spending days walking around the city, often following the walking routes in the Michelin Green Guide.

Fortunately Linda was a fluent French speaker as the guide, then rather more encyclopedic than more recent editions was then only available in French and my O Level was often a little tested. And she could pass as French though often people she talked to took her as being rather simple-minded as she asked about things to which anyone French would know the answer. Most of my visits to Paris have been in her company, though many of the walks I made on later visits were on my own, especially when we had children with us who she took to parks and other children’s activities.

We were no longer students, though still fairly broke, and we still had valid student cards which let us stay in the hostel – in a room so poorly lit by a single bulb run on a lower voltage than it was made for that it was hardly possible to do anything but go to bed when we arrived back – and also to get free or much reduced admission to all the museums. On later visits I found my NUT card as a teacher also got me into many too.

I think I had three lenses for the Zenith B, the standard 58mm f2, along with a short telephoto and a 35mm wide angle. It was noisy in operation and sometimes required considerable force to wind on – and it was easy to rip the film when doing so. The viewfinder showed around 90% of the image. You had to focus at full aperture on the ground glass screen, then stop the lens down to the taking aperture.

The Zorki 4 was smaller and lighter and I’d bought it with the 50mm f2 which was a decent lens. The viewfinder had a split image area for focusing which seemed fairly accurate, but what you saw at the edges depended on where you put you eye to it. The film wound on smoothly and the shutter, having no mirror was considerably less intrusive if not quite to Leica standards.

Neither camera needed a battery. There was no exposure metering or autofocus and it was up to the user to set the appropriate aperture and shutter speed. On a thin cord around my neck I had a Weston Master V, and in my camera bag its Invercone which enabled it to measure incident rather than reflected light when possible. Again this was battery-free, using a large light cell which generated a current, though this limited its sensibility. Weston meters had an outstanding reputation among photographers and film-makers but in later years I replaced it by a more sensitive meter that could measure much lower light levels and even flash.

Despite the rather primitive equipment and my own lack of experience, the 1973 Paris work resulted in my first portfolio published in a photographic magazine the following year which included several of the pictures in this post, all of which come from that trip.

By the time I returned to Paris I had more modern equipment, mainly working with Olympus OM Cameras, at first the OM1, later the OM2 and OM4. On some trips I also took a Leica M2 a range-finder with a much better viewfinder than the Zorki. More recently I’ve photographed in Paris with various Nikon DSLRs and a Leica M8.

One of my earliest attempts at a book was made from the pictures I took in 1973, with the image above on the cover, but it only ever got as far as a single dummy, made by stitching together images printed on 8×10 resin coated paper.

In 1984 I took a couple of weeks working on the project ‘In Search of Atget‘, inspired by the pictures I’d first come across in Paris museums during that 1973 visit. I later showed this work and in 2012 self-published the book which is still available in softcover or as a PDF on Blurb. A second book, of colour pictures, ‘Photo Paris‘ taken in 1988 is also still available on Blurb.

My web site Paris Photos includes pictures from visits to Paris in 1973 and 1984 mentioned above, as well as several later visits. Albums on Flickr have larger versions of many of these pictures.
In Search of Atget – Paris 1984
1984 Paris Colour
Around Paris 1988
Around Noisy-le-Grand and Paris – 1990
Paris – November 2007

There are also some accounts of my visits to Paris mainly for Paris Photo since 2006 on My London Diary. It’s now been some years since our last visit, though every year we promise ourselves a visit and one day it may happen.

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.

Peter Fetterman GalleryNouvelle Vague

Peter Fetterman Gallery
Nouvelle Vague