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.