Buttes Chaumont and Belleville Traversée: Monday 17th November 2008 was the last day of our stay in Paris where I had come with my wife for a week for me to go to Paris Photo and for the two of us to enjoy the city and the huge number of photographic shows that were taking place there. On My London Diary you can read PARIS SUPPLEMENT, my diary of our week there.
Rue de Tanger, 19e
We had arrived in Paris the previous Monday and the first thing we did on arriving there was to buy our weekly tickets – then Carte Orange – for bus and metro transport across the city – incredible value for those used to UK transport prices.
Parc de Buttes Chaumont
But that of course had finished on Sunday. And the only real way to see any city is on foot, so we decided to spend the day before our Eurostar train left for London at 17.13 taking a walk around some of our favourite places, booking out but leaving our cases in the hotel foyer to collect later.
Le Voltigeur on the courner of rue des Couronnes
As you will see from the pictures here we first made our way to Paris’s most fantastic park, Buttes Chaumont, a former gypsum quarry and waste tip converted into gothic fantasy, and then on to Belleville.
Earlier in our stay we had visited the Bar Floreal where I had been given a free copy of a small book produced some years earlier for a show there by Willy Ronis (1910-2009), one of my several favourite photographers of Paris, ‘la traversée de Belleville’ which describes his favourite walk around the area.
Rue Laurence Savart, 20e
Linda was keen to use this and find exactly the scenes in his pictures, while I was more interested in making my own pictures, and had followed a quite similar route some years earlier. But it was interesting to see it through his eyes, although considerable redevelopment had changed the area since he walked it in 1990. And more since 2008.
Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, 11e
Rather more atmospheric than my pictures is the video which Ronis appears and speaks about some of his pictures in made at the time of the show in 1990.
Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, 11e
Unfortunately the restaurant ‘Aux Monts D’Auvergne’ at which we ate a splendid three course lunch had been replaced by another by the time we next came to Paris. After the large meal we struggled a little but did just about manage to finish the ‘Traversée’, walk back to the hotel to collect our luggage and catch our train and were back home on the outskirts of London by 8pm.
Canal St Martin
There is more detail about the day in the text on My London Diary as well as in the picture captions – and as usual many more pictures.
Paris Photo 2012: I’ve missed Paris Photo again – the 2024 ‘edition’ took place from November 6th – 10th and it was deliberate.
Magnum at the Rotonde de la Villette
By 2012 when these pictures from my Paris Photomonth Diary were made I’d been to around half a dozen of these annual events and had become rather bored by them though Paris was always enticing. Something of which I tried to capture in my book of a similar name, PHOTO PARIS, colour images I made there in 1988.
But the actual Paris Photo had lost its appeal for me, and while I still went dutifully around the many stalls I was finding less and less to attract my interest. Many dealers seemed to have more or less the same work on show each year, and more and more of the space seemed to be taken up by huge prints dedicated to commercial decor rather than having much photographic interest.
Of course I always met a few old acquaintances – and occasionally met some interesting people, but I also found myself more and more being treated with disdain by some of the exhibitors; I was too clearly a poor photographer rather than a rich collector.
I’ve never been convinced that photography becoming part of the art market has been a good thing. It has certainly produced a great deal of pretentious and empty work though it has provided an income for those few photographers who have learnt how to play it – with some becoming millionaire celebrities.
Of course there is no merit to starving in garrets but most of the photographers whose work interests me have made relatively modest livings from their work, some relying on income from other sources such as teaching or writing to supplement their income from photography. They were driven by vision and conviction rather than dollars.
From the start of my visits to Paris Photo it wasn’t the actual trade show that I found of most interest, but the huge explosion of photography across the city around it, in galleries, museums, shops and various public places. For the month around the show Paris was awash with photography.
More recently here we have had Photo London, but this has not attracted the city-wide festival of photography that takes place in Paris. The nearest we have had to that was the East London Photomonth organised by Alternative Arts which I think last took place in 2018. I organised several shows over the years which were included in this.
Photography has never enjoyed the kind of widespread cultural regard that our medium commands in France, nor has it developed the relationships that exist there. My friend John Benton-Harris often bemoaned the lack of any real photographic culture in Britain compared with that in his native city of New York.
On My London Diary in 2012 I wrote at length about the limitations of Paris Photo which is about photography as a commodity. Dealers can only show what they have for sale – and so for example despite his enormous importance in the history of photography and his encylopaedic work in Paris, Atget was almost invisible and that the search for novelty by contemporary galleries “All too often this seems to be a turning against the peculiar link with reality which to me is at the root of interest in our medium.“
And I commented, “After a few minutes walking around the great hall containing the photo fair I never wanted again to see work in which people had painted on their photographs, punched holes in them, cut them up, processed them deliberately badly and so on. I’ve never thought showing contempt for the photograph a likely way to produce worthwhile results, but there were rather too many photographers and galleries at Paris Photo who seem to think so.”
But otherwise there was plenty of work in Paris; “around 80 exhibitions in the Mois de la Photo, another 100 or so in the fringe festival, the Photo Off, over 50 in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Photo Festival, and what seemed to be countless other shows outside of these events, as well as shows of work for the Prix Pictet, the Prix de Photographie Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des beaux-arts, the Prix Arcimboldo for creation of digital images, the Prix Carmignac Gestion for photojournalism.” And that was not all, apart from Paris itself, always fascinating.
Many more pictures on My London Diary from the week we spent in Paris in November 2012 in my PARIS PHOTOMONTH DIARY.
Jesse Jackson, Cuts & Paris • New York • London Opening: Wednesday 20th October 2010 was an unusual day for me. I don’t often photograph conferences, but I started at one where Jesse Jackson was speaking and then went to lobby my MP over tax justice. Kwasi Kwarteng was seldom seen in the constituency but later became notorious when he helped Liz Truss crash the economy. From there I used to cover people marching to Downing Street against the government spending cuts before leaving to go to the Shoreditch Gallery for the opening of a show by three photographers I had organised, ‘Paris – New York – London’ (I was Paris.)
Jesse Jackson & Christian Aid Lobby – Westminster
2,500 Christian Aid supporters including my wife had come to Westminster to lobby their MPs on 20.10.2010, asking them to press for transparency and fairness in the global tax system and for action on climate change.
According to campaigners for tax justice various forms of tax dodging by multinational companies was then robbing the global South of more than $160 billion a year. And our high dependence of fossil fuels had led to a climate crisis which impacts these countries far more severely despite their much lower per capita carbon footprints.
The rally took place in the vast Methodist Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, and as we were reminded where the United Nations started. There was a huge ovation for US Civil Rights leader, activist and politician Jesse Jackson, a protégée of Martin Luther King president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
But there were also other distinguished speakers including the then new director of Christian Aid, Loretta Minghella, Suzanne Matale from Zambia and secretary of state for international development and MP for Sutton Coldfield, Rt. Hon Andrew Mitchell MP.
After the rally we met our local MP Kwasi Kwarteng and went with him into a pub opposite Parliament where he he listened to us and basically told us we didn’t understand global finance and climate change, before going outside to pose with for photographs.
Outside there was some street theatre by younger Christian Aid supporters as people queued to meet there MPs and I made a few pictures before rushing away to find people marching to protest against government cuts.
March Against Spending Cuts – Malet St & Lincolns Inn Fields
Earlier in the day the government had announced there would be considerable cuts in welfare benefits and the loss of many public sector jobs as services are cut following their comprehensive spending review.
The deficit left by New Labour had given the Tories in the Con-Dem coalition a perfect excuse to slash the public sector and privatise services in a way they would never have dared before. £83 billion to be cut from public services, in a move that the Coalition of Resistance pointed out will mean many workers with less to spend and cause a slump in the economy.
But as I commented “Big business must be rubbing its hands with glee at the thought of the profits it will be able to make in the health service, from so-called ‘free schools’ and elsewhere.”
But for the rest of us the prospect was bleak. More than a million jobs lost – and some would be replaced in the private sector with lower wages, fewer benefits, lower standards of delivery and safety and higher workloads. Profit will come before anything else in the kind of “efficiency” we’ve seen in hospital cleaning – where I found used needles and dressings under my hospital bed as cleaners were not allowed the time to do the job properly.
I went to photograph students setting off from outside the student union in Malet Street for the march to Downing Street, then went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where trade unionists and more students gathering and there were speeches from an open top bus before they too set off.
But I went in the opposite direction to my opening at the Shoreditch Gallery.
John Benton Harris (1929-2023), one of the finest photographers to come out of New York, settled in London in 1965 but continued also to photograph his native city and elsewhere. He was long a personal friend and I worked with him on a number of his projects including his Café Royal Zines and his unpublished book on the English.
Paul Baldesare, another friend of mine with whom I’ve often shown pictures and a former student of John Benton-Harris showed work from one of his many projects on London, He is probably best known for his pictures on the tube.
And I was showing a selection of images made in Paris in 1988 from a book I had also then recently published on Blurb.
Paris August 1973: We all start in photography some time, and although I’d owned a camera of sorts for some years my real start in photography came in August 1973 in Paris.
My interest in photography had begun when I was very young, looking at the pages of Picture Post from my toddler years. We were too poor to actually buy the magazine but got old copies given to us by friends and neighbours and even before I could read – self-taught when I was 4 – we played with these, looking at the pictures, drawing over them and doubtless tearing them up. Later we were give a large stack of old National Geographic Magazines on the death of a wealthier distant relative, and on wet days when we couldn’t go out and play on the streets we would leaf through these laying on the floor.
When around 8 or 9 I had got my first camera given to me by my brother Jim, the eldest of us four children and then over twice my age. He had worked briefly for Ranks who then handled Pentax cameras and had taken up photography slightly as a hobby though on a very amateur level. The only pictures I remember him taking were some posed portraits of members of the family and family groups. His interests were largely technical and they included some pictures taken with flashbulbs including one of the family (except him) seated around the breakfast table.
The camera he gave me was not of course a Pentax but a plastic Kodak Brownie 127 and it was loaded with film. I carefully made my 8 exposures and then opened the camera back and was disappointed to find there were no pictures on the film. I never used the camera again!
Later at the age of around eleven I graduated from the Junior to the Adult public library and on my regular weekly visits there would spend some time leafing through the pages of Amateur Photographer, with a growing interest in the pictures of often scantily clad women – and even the occasional very cautiously posed nude.
When I was around 14 I would walk several times a week past a pawnbrokers and jewellers near my home. In Tracz’s window was a shiny 35mm camera which looked just like those in AP, a Halina 35X made in Hong Kong. I lusted after that camera, but the price tag on it was over 150 times my then weekly pocket money income.
For over a year I saved very penny, including the odd half-crown gifts at Christmas and my birthday, wearing the shop window thin as I rubbed my nose on it every time I went past, hoping it had not been sold. Finally I had a heavy cardboard box full of small change to take to the shop. But when I counted it out on the counter I found it was 5d short and broke down in tears. For probably the only time in his life as a shop-keeper, Mr Tracz relented and made a sale for less than the advertised price.
I had a camera, but it was only a couple of years later that I could afford to buy and film and pay for it to be processed. I think it will have been Ilford FP3 and I posted it to the cheapest service in the AP small ads – I think developing and en-prints cost me just under a pound. As well as a couple of family portraits made in my back garden I got on my bike and photographed some of the ancient oak trees in Richmond Park and another landscape there. The results were not too encouraging, partly because of the poor quality of the printing.
In the next ten years I probably took another ten films, I think only one black and white, the rest holiday pictures and a girlfriend sitting in a cherry tree (we’d broken up before I got the slides back.) A pound or so sounds cheap, but back then I was living on around £300 a year and after rent, food and bus fares there was nothing to spare on taking photographs.
I’d also managed to drop the Halina in a lake on my first visit to Paris, taking the woman later my wife rowing at Versailles. The boatman had later managed to find it and fish it out with his boathook and I think was rather disappointed when all he received for his efforts was profuse thanks rather than a large tip. The slides from the film in it had a strange colouration and the camera was never quite the same again, giving random shutter speeds at all settings but seldom fast enough to prevent camera shake. Later I gave it to my brother-in-law who continued to use it for some years despite this.
In 1971 I took short courses on photography, film and media studies as a part of a graduate teaching course and also met the first real photographer I had known who was taking the same course. So when I started earning money from teaching I was able to buy a new camera and also the gear – developing tank, trays, enlarger – to enable me to develop and print my own films, taping black plastic sheeting over the kitchen window to do so.
I was lucky in that my local library had several books from the original Ansel Adams Basic Photo Series, particularly volume 3 ‘The Print‘ first published in 1968. Although my earlier course had taught me the very basics, I really learnt how to print from Ansel. And although I’m not the greatest fan of his images, he was certainly a very fine printmaker.
Of course I still couldn’t afford a Leica – or even a Pentax. But there were cheap Russian cameras available, both rangefinders and SLRs. I tried several but settled on a Zenit B, a heavily built SLR, buying it with the more expensive Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 lens. Mine was the later version with and M42 screw mount.
By 1983 I had added both a Jupiter-9 85mm f2 and a Mir 37mm f2.8 to my camera bag, as well as buying a modern relatively compact Olympus-35SP 35mm camera which had auto-exposure and 42mm f1.7 lens.
So I had the equipment to become a photographer but didn’t really know then what I wanted to use it for. My first real photographic project was taking pictures of Paris in 1973. Many of these pictures were made with the Zenith, but I found the Olympus easier to use when photographing people.
Although neither of us were still students we still were able as recent ex-students to stay at a cheap student hostel in a palatial town house in the centre of Paris, and as teachers our union cards got free entry to the museums in the city. So we were able to spend time cheaply in Paris, a city small enough for those fit and young to cover on foot, including most of the many promenades in an old French Green Michelin guide during a stay of several weeks.
We picnicked in the local parks, ate cheap meals in the hostel including as much bread and jam as we could manage at breakfast, bought cheap wine and I took photographs. After dark we struggled back up several flights of grand stairs to our room and collapsed exhausted on the bed, the room barely lit by the dimmest light bulb I have ever seen.
Eventually we had to return home and recover in time to start a new term of teaching. Over the next few weeks I developed the films and made prints, sending a batch of 10x8s to one of the better photographic magazines and receiving more or less by return a letter from the editor informing me they were to be published as a portfolio, praising my vision (and also complaining slightly that some were not quite sharp!)
I think most of the pictures here were in the few pages of that portfolio, but 50 years on I can’t find a copy or the letter from the editor though I’m sure I will have kept both somewhere. It was the first serious publication of my work, but I find I’ve not included it on my CV.
Back in 2009 I put a larger selection of images, 35 in all, from that trip on-line at Paris 73 where you can still view them. I’ll probably put some larger images online as a Flickr album shortly.
Saturday In Paris. It’s some years since I’ve been to Paris for the large Paris Photo show and the Mois de la Photo, though for a few years I went regularly. Partly I got bored with seeing the same work again and again at many dealers stalls in Paris Photo, and it also seemed increasingly dominated by the kind of large images for corporate walls that had little interest for me (but sold at huge prices per square foot.)
Paris Photo generally occupied me during a couple of days, but most of my time on my visit was spent in visiting the many other exhibitions around the city which was really saturated with photography with a huge fringe of events. One evening I managed to attend five openings, though by the last I think the wine was taking a toll, and to pack in almost 90 shows in a five day visit – and there had been others where a short look had led me to turn away. There has never been anything like this in Britain, perhaps the closest we have ever got to it was in the East London Photomonth.
The more interesting of those shows I went to I reviewed here on >Re:PHOTO and you can still find these reviews in the archives, along with every other post I’ve written on this site. And there are also posts covering many of our walks, along with some like this on My London Diary.
The walks around Paris were sometimes more interesting than the shows. I first came to Paris to visit Linda who was then staying in a student hostel to the south of the city in 1965 and we’ve returned quite a few times since we were married, always taking long walks as well as making the most of our weekly travel tickets (which cost little more than a day’s public transport around London.) Few pages of the Michelin Green Guide have been left unturned over the years.
On Saturday 15th November Linda and I left our cheap hotel close to the Metro at Barbes Roucechoaurt after breakfast and walked to the Rotonde de la Villette. As always I found a few things to photograph. We were on our way to visit shows by Gilles Raynaldy and then on to work by two photographers at a new arts centre in what had previously been the municipal funeral services.
The Metro took us to the centre of Paris for a short non-photographic interlude, including a nostalgic picnic in the Square du Vert Galant on the tip of the Ile de la Cite before another train took us to Galerie Vu and a show by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjork, who I had met at the FotoArtFestival in Poland in 2005. Sadly he died in 2015.
Then we walked around the Marais, visiting a number of shows their, some rather briefly though others held our attention rather more, including work by Robert McCabe & Aurelia Alcais.
Some of the galleries were perhaps more impressive than the shows in them and this was true of the Galerie Karsten Greve in the rue Debelleyme (it also has galleries in Cologne and St Moritz which perhaps tells you something about who it’s audience is) which was showing work by Italian photographer Mimmo Jodice. I didn’t feel it was worth my writing about.
More to our taste was a show across the road in the Galerie Blue Square with remarkable images from the Global Underground project by artists Valera and Natasha Cherkashin.
Around the rue Vielle du Temple we looked in briefly at a number of shows, several of them aimed at the fetish market but none detained us long. On the rue du Perche we found John Bulmer’s ‘Hard Sixties: L’Angleterre post-industrielle, black and white and colour images from the 1960s in the north of England, mainly around Manchester where we had spent the first few years of our married life (all we could afford as a honeymoon was a day coach trip to the Lake District.)
It was getting dark and we took the Metro back to our hotel to change and then go out to meet Linda’s brother and his wife who live on the outskirts of Paris on the Grands Boulevards. We had planned to enjoy a three course meal at Chartier, but they weren’t feeling well so I was disappointed when we simply went to a creperie.
They left early to go back home and we took another Metro ride to Trocadero and walked down and across the bridge to stand under the Eiffel Tower, admiring its ring of blue stars to mark Sarkozy’s term as President of the European Council.
We then walked around the area, but it was late and the streets were dark and deserted. Eventually we came to a bus stop and after a wait of around 15 minutes a bus arrived and took us to the Place de Clichy.
Here the boulevard at least was still lit up and there were plenty of people as we walked on past Place Blanche and on to Place Pigalle, wandering past or hanging around the various sad-looking neon-covered come-on facades of sex shops and clubs. I took some more pictures, though with the large and obvious Nikon I kept my distance and concentrated on the signs. We walked back around a mile to our hotel and were exhausted after a long day.
Wednesday 20th October 2020 was a rather different day for me. I started photographing speakers at an indoor rally, something I rarely do, went off to meet with my MP in a pub, then photographed a march against cuts in welfare and the loss of public sector jobs, ending the day at the opening of a show featuring myself and two other photographers, one of whom, Paul Baldesare took two of the pictures in that section of today’s post.
Jesse Jackson & Christian Aid Lobby – Westminster, Wednesday 20 October 2010
I was one of the 2,500 or so Christian Aid supporters who came to Westminster to lobby their MPs on 20.10.2010, asking them to press for transparency and fairness in the global tax system and for action on climate change.
The day started with a rally in the Methodist palace of Westminster Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey, the hall where the inaugural meeting of the United Nations General Assembly took place in January 1946. The Methodists had then moved out for a few months to allow this to take place, and special seating, translation booths installed, along with extra lighting to allow the event to be photographed and televised. But I think that lighting must have been removed as it was pretty dim inside for me to photograph the speakers. But I and a small group from my constituency were fortunate to be inside as there wasn’t enough room for all who came.
Supporters outside Methodist Central Hall
There were speakers from this country and abroad, but the star of the event was undoubtedly the Rev Jesse Jackson, a noted US civil rights and political activist, president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988.
After the rally and a hurried lunch a small group of us from his Spelthorne constituency met with our then recently elected MP, Kwasi Kwarteng, who suggested we find a place in the St Stephen’s Tavern to talk rather than have to go through the tedious business of queueing to go through security to meet inside the parlimentary offices. Although he was still relatively unknown it was rather easy to find him, as there are relatively few extremely tall black male MPs. Though rather more share his educational background of prep school and Eton.
Since then his rise to fame has been rapid, though after his recent sacking after only 38 days as Chancellor of the Exchequer, perhaps that should be notoriety. He has only visited his constituency on fairly rare occasions and I’ve yet to meet him again, though have seen him from a distance outside parliament.
He listened – or at least stayed fairly quiet – while my wife and others talked about the campaign for tax justice and the need for reforms to stop the various forms of tax dodging by major companies robs poor countries of more than $160bn a year, while climate change and the natural disasters it is bringing have a vastly greater impact on the poorer countries who are most vulnerable, despite their much lower per capita carbon footprints. They suffer from the results of our high dependence on fossil fuels.
But his response to the lobbying was perhaps best described as ‘mansplaining’; we were not at the time aware of his work as a consultant for the Odey Asset Management hedge fund or the recent allegations by Private Eye that he has continued to receive undeclared contributions from them. Certainly his activities as Chancellor have resulted in them and other hedge funds who bet against the pound making millions.
March Against Spending Cuts – Malet St & Lincolns Inn Fields, Wed 20 Oct 2010
This was the day that the government announced the results of their comprenhensive spending review (CSR) which involved considerable cuts in welfare benefits and the loss of many public sector jobs as services are cut. The deficit left by the outgoing New Labour government had given the Tories in the Con-Dem coalition a perfect excuse to slash the public sector and privatise services in a way they would never have dared before.
More than a million public sector jobs were expected to be lost, with some being replaced by private sector workers on lower wages, fewer benefits, lower standards of delivery and safety and higher workloads. There will be more cases of people suffering as private companies expand into healthcare, putting profits before the needs of people, and similar changes in other areas.
The Coalition of Resistance who called the protest say the £83 billion to be cut from public services will plunge the economy into a slump. Rather than cutting jobs, pay, pensions, benefits, and public services that will hit the poor ten times harder than the rich, they urge the government to cut bank profits and bonuses, tax the rich and big business. Rather than contract out the NHS, they should axe Trident and withdraw from Afghanistan.
I had to leave before the rally at the end of the march at Downing Street to prepare for the opening of an exhibition I had organised in Hoxton.
Paris • New York • London Opening – Shoreditch Gallery, Hoxton Market. Wed 20 Oct 2010
Paris, 1988
Together with two photographer friends I had put on the show Paris • New York • London at the Shoreditch Gallery which was attached to a cafe in Hoxton Market, a small street just off Great Eastern Street, close to Hoxton Square. Rather confusingly this is not where the actual Hoxton Market is now held which is in Hoxton St.
The show was a part of the East London Photomonth annual photography festival, and over the month it was on attracted a decent number of visitors and comments. My section was Paris, and I’d ordered a decent number of copies of my book, Photo Paris, still available at Blurb, most of which sold at the show. Unfortunately I think it now costs around twice as much as I was able to sell it for then.
Paul Baldesare’s pictures of London and pictures taken by John Benton-Harris in New York completed the show and you can still see the work online on a small web site I wrote for the event. Thanks to Paul for some pictures taken at the opening where I was too busy talking to use a camera.
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.
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.
Paris, August 1988. Most of August 1988 I spent in Paris with my family, although I rather deserted them at times to go out in long walks through the city on my own. But some of them do appear on quite a few of the roughly 1500 pictures I took.
La France, Paris, 2e, 1988 88-8u-21
Back in November 2020 I posted here Montreuil, Paris which told a little about our stay in a flat in Montreuil on the east edge of the city, and where “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.”
As I also mentioned there, almost the first thing we did after arriving was to get photographs of our two sons at a photobooth so we could get their ‘Carte Orange’ and then buy weekly tickets for the Metro system – as I commented at ” little more than the cost of a day travelcard in London.” We made good use of those tickets, travelling around Paris and its outskirts as you can see from the album Around Paris 1988.
The final sentence of my post in 2020 ended by saying I would feature more of the pictures in some later posts, but I don’t think I’ve ever got around to it. Nor have I put together a book from these images taken in 1988, though I there is one of the colour images I made, Photo Paris 1988. As usual with Blurb, the price of a hardcopy is ridiculous, but there is a much more reasonable PDF version. And you can view a good selection of the images for free on the preview. I haven’t yet put an album of these colour images on Flickr, but perhaps I will.
Here is the description of the book:
An evocative look at a Paris much of which was disappearing as the photographer walked the streets and took these pictures in 1988.
Peter Marshall’s pictures show a city and its fringes beyond the tourist circuit, capturing some of the flavour of the real Paris, but it is also very much a Paris of the imagination.
It’s time took a good look again at the black and white images from 1988 and made a book of them – and perhaps that will happen some time. A few have been published elsewhere, including a few I printed by alternative printing processes which I was dabbling with around this time, such as salt prints, kallitype and cyanotype. But I soon came back to more normal photographic printing.
Fauborg St Antoine, 11e, 11th, Paris, 1988 88-8y-61
Arcueil, Val-de-Marne, Paris 1988
Self-portrait, Paris, 10e, 1988 88-8w-34
There are 366 images online in the album Around Paris 1988 and the selection here has just a few of my favourites, all uncropped. It would be difficult to make a selection but I think it could make a good book.
Housing activists Focus E15 had been an irritant to Newham Council and its mayor Robin Wales ever since the group of young mothers fought the threat to close their hostel and scatter them across the country away from family and friends. Their high profile campaign with direct actions gained national coverage and admiration and after their succesful fight they continued as a ‘Housing For All’ campaign giving support to others with housing problems, particularly in their London borough of Newham.
Every Saturday the group hold a street stall on Stratford Broadway on a wide area of pavement outside Wilko every Saturday for over 2 years offering advice to those with housing problems and drawing attention to the failure of Newham Council to sensibly address the acute housing problem in the borough.
In 2015 there were around 5,000 people living in temporary accommodation despite 400 homes in good condition empty on the Carpenters Estate close to the centre of Stratford which the council began clearing around ten years previously in the hope of selling the site for development. They continue to oppose the council policy of attempting to force those needing housing out of London and into private rented property in towns and cities across the country- Hastings, Birmingham, Manchester etc – and even in Wales, socially cleansing the borough which now has large new developments of expensive high rise flats.
A week earlier, Newham Council’s Law Enforcement officer came with police to continue their harassment of the street stall, telling them they were not allowed to protest and threatening to seize their stall, sound system, banners and other gear. Focus E15 resisted but police seized the table and threw it into the back of their van. A few days later, the council having realised the seizure was illegal wrote to the campaign asking them to reclaim their table. Focus E15 asked for it to be delivered back to where it had been taken, and had already organised this ‘Free The Table’ rally with people coming to defend the right to protest. That table didn’t arrive but others had come with them for a ‘tablegate’ protest.
Back in Westminster, the Campaign Against Climate Change was protesting against the inadequacy of the COP21 Paris deal, which sets the target temperature rise too high and has no way to enforce the measures needed by carrying a ‘red line’ banner across Westminster Bridge.
The protest with a 300 metre length of red cloth and the short rally beforehand emphasized that “the world needs to take urgent action to keep fossil fuels – including shale oil, with fracking now shown to be as dirty as coal – in the ground, or at least only to be extracted as chemical feedstock rather than fuel, and an increased urgency in the transition to renewable energy. While a few years ago that might have seemed expensive and not feasible, the economics of energy generation have changed rapidly with green energy rapidly becoming the cheaper source. But huge vested interests still lie behind the dirty fuel lobby.”
As darkness fell, refugees, solidarity campaigners and Syrian activists at a Downing St vigil demanded justice for refugees, opening of EU borders to those fleeing war and terrorism and a much more generous response from the UK government. Six years later many of us remain ashamed and disgusted at the miserable response of the Tory government to refugees from Syria and more recently from Afghanistan. The UK has been so much less generous than many other countries and is increasingly adopting a more hostile attitude to asylum seekers, particularly now those attempting to cross the English Channel.
A strong wind made it difficult to keep the candles for this vigil alight, and though eventually this was solved by using plastic cups as wind shields it made the candles less photogenic.
While I was photographing the climate protest on Westminster Bridge, a large group of Santas on BMX bikes rode across and I rushed to photograph them. Later I found this was an annual BMX Life Christmas ‘Santa Cruise’ in aid of ECHO, a small charity helping kids with heart conditions.
Later as I walked through Trafalgar Square on my way to catch a bus I came across more Santas, coming to the end of the their ‘Santacon’ which I described a few posts back as a “day-long alcohol-fuelled crawl through London”. I’d been too busy to bother with going to photograph the event earlier in the day, but spent a few minutes taking pictures before seeing my bus approach and running to the stop.
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.
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.
.JPG)
.JPG)
