Tag: Leica M8

Paris in November – 2007

Paris in November: My trip to Paris in November 2007 was the only time I had stayed there on my own – and it made my visit rather different. Every other time I’ve been with my wife who speaks French more or less like a native – her accent impeccable, her grammar better than most who live there but her vocabulary now rather out of date, and had relied on her and spent much of my time there in her company. My own ‘O level’ 45 years earlier was extremely rusty and never really taught me to speak the language though I can still read a little and understand some if people speak slowly and clearly – as few in Paris do.

Paris in November - 2007
A passage close to my hotel

I’d come to Paris by Eurostar on the final day that their trains ran out of Waterloo. The following day, Tuesday 14th November 2007, was the first full day of my visit and also the day on which Paris Photo 2007 opened.

Paris in November - 2007

Here I’ll post what I wrote about that day back in 2007 with a few of my pictures from the day and links to many more on My London Diary.

Paris 2e, 9e and 6e

Paris in November - 2007

Next morning I had nothing special to do. Although I was in Paris to see photographs, none of the shows I wanted to view opened until 1pm. Eating a leisurely breakfast at the bar of a café close to my hotel I picked up a French newspaper and found their was a ‘manif‘ with the strikers meeting at Montparnasse at 2.30pm, and decided I’d take my Leica M8 along for some pictures.

Paris in November - 2007

Before then I had a walk around the 9th arrondissement before returning to a salad bar near my hotel for a very tasty ‘formule‘ with salmon salad, yogurt with a sweet chestnut paste and orange juice, and making my way across the Pont du Carroussel and down through the 6th to Montparnasse.

More pictures from my walk on My London Diary

Paris Manif – Transport Workers on Strike

Paris in November - 2007

Perhaps everything seemed a little less organised than London demonstrations, and a big difference was the number of vehicles that appeared to be a part of it – in England such demonstrations are simply marches. The police tactics also seemed to be different, as there were none at all around where the march was massing, although there were plenty of them waiting around vans a few hundred metres along the road. And a number of those taking part in the ‘manif’ were wearing helmets and body padding in case of police attacks.

One difficulty was not being able to recognise the various union leaders. Rather than simply photographing them as usual I had to look for media scrums to identify who they were – and then get stuck in. At home I’m more often the guy who gets there first. But somehow it seemed easier to do here, perhaps because I was working with a smaller bag and the Leica. [I think all these pictures were with the Summilux 35mm f1.4, a ‘standard’ focal length on the M8.]

And then I saw an angel. Really. All in white, big wings, and walking through the crowd of demonstrators, and quickly took a couple of pictures. Later I photographed him again and gave him my card. It turns out he was © L’Ange Blanc, [also the name of one of France’s most famous wrestlers who died in 2006. The blog with more information about ‘Angel White’ and his “human action, highly social and spiritual to convey a message of universal love” that I linked to in 2007 no longer exists.]

The demonstration looked as if it was just starting to move around 4pm when I had to head off towards the Carrousel du Louvre and Paris Photo.

More pictures from the protest on My London Diary

Photographers in Paris for Paris Photo

I took very few pictures inside the show

Then it was on to Paris Photo, held in the bowels of the earth under the Louvre. 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.

Friends in a bar near Chatelet – Conrad Hafenrichter and Mike Seaborne

Inside the show, its far more cramped and claustrophobic, but there really are a lot of photographs on display on the stalls of the 80 or so dealers and 20 publishers, as well as special shows – this year of Italian photography – and the BMW prize.

Frankly both the Italian stuff and the prize were disappointing, and much of the large colour images on many stands were prestigiously expensive head office decor with little interest. But inside the stands the walls were crammed with an incredible variety of photography, including some truly great work amid the dross, including many of the classic images of photography. And on many of the booths you could browse in more depth in boxes of images.

John Benton-Harris (1939-2023)

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.

On my way to my hotel from Stolly’s bar

Several friends of mine had work on various stands, and they and many others were over there to see the show, meet people, go to the other exhibitions on in Paris, perhaps take some pictures and have a good time. I won’t bore you with a list of those I met, but it would be a good list of the best in British photography as well as a number of those I know from other countries. There were also quite a few others who I know were there that I didn’t manage to meet up with.

By around 6.30, the place was beginning to fill up with people coming for the opening at 7pm. Another of the problems of Paris Photo is that there is nowhere there to get anything decent to eat or drink, and half a dozen of us left for a considerably cheaper bar near the city hall, then on to a meal in a bistro, and finally to another bar, Stolly’s in the Marais.

It had been a long and interesting day – and rather different to those when I came together with Linda, and my the time I was walking back home from that last bar either my Leica was getting tired or its operator was pleasantly a little inebriated.

More pictures on My London Diary

I slept well and was up early the next morning to go out for breakfast and then explore more of Paris. You can read more about my next three days in the city – with many more pictures some taken by others on my Leica M8 including some rather unusual pictures of me – and my return to a rather disappointing St Pancras on the November 2007 page of My London Diary.

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Remembering Paris


Paris Photo 2006

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.

Paris 1984

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.

Paris 1984

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.

Paris November 2006

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.

Paris Photo 2012

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.