{"id":12722,"date":"2021-11-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-14T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=12722"},"modified":"2021-11-11T11:33:31","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T11:33:31","slug":"remembering-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=12722","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


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Paris Photo 2006<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paris 1984<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> and Photo Paris<\/a>, with black and white images from 1984 and colour work from 1988 respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paris 1984<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You can see more of the work from Paris in several albums on Flickr<\/a> – 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 w<\/a>eb site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paris November 2006<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2007 I wrote about my visit for Paris Photo on My London Diary<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 caf\u00e9 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I spent the morning walking around Paris<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paris Photo 2012<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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

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Paris 2008<\/em> – in the steps of Willy Ronis<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 … Continue reading Remembering Paris<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1337,6004,6008,6007,80,522,3035,2768,83,6005,16,6006],"class_list":["post-12722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","tag-flickr","tag-in-search-of-atget","tag-leica-m8","tag-manif","tag-my-london-diary","tag-paris","tag-paris-photo","tag-paris-photos","tag-peter-marshall","tag-photo-paris","tag-protest","tag-transport-workers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12723,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12722\/revisions\/12723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}