I shouldn’t write this in public, but I will anyway. As I get older I get lazier. Let’s just call it an intensified search for efficiency. To my annual sojourn in Paris this late summer season I did take a Fuji X100T — the camera I’ve written about several times in this blog. Yet […]
Tag Archives: Paris
Paris’s Jeu de Paume – more accurately, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume – has an interesting history. The building is only a century and a half old, dating from the administration of Napoleon III. It was indeed built as a tennis court for the older and more complex game then played […]
In a quartier of Paris that has seen much renovation and new construction in recent decades, Bercy Village stands as a kind of model of what a modern shopping center might offer to build community. There are numerous shaded, terraced restaurants and cafes along the main alleyway, and extensive programs, at least in the summer, of […]
You know how it is when you see someone’s creative product and you think “Oh, I want to be that guy when I grow up!” Having looked at a LOT of documentary photographs in the past decades, I’ll be doggoned if I know how I’ve missed Louis Stettner, but he’s the guy I want […]
No, I haven’t gotten rid of any cameras. I probably should have. But that would mean making holes in my two systems, however flawed those systems may be. The Canon system is arguably the “better” system, as a DSLR with a couple of extra bodies, a handful of reliable prime lenses and several cheap but worthy […]
I spent the winter holidays in London at my teenaged daughter’s urging. I asked her to consider a warmer clime, but she was adamant. She has used up her chips, for the predictable future. It was — surprise — cold, rainy, and crowded. Yet I hadn’t been to London since 1989 (I can’t believe that). […]
Now that is a portentous title for what should be just a note — a personal note, to be sure, but one that I hope has some resonance for you photographers and other memorialists out there. As I was strolling one of my favorite patches near the Palais Royal yesterday, I saw a street chamber […]
The globeranging photographer Reza has mounted a stunning and irresistible exhibit on the banks of the Seine: les berges de Seine, Paris’s new playground. No, it’s not just the sandy beaches (plages) of summer, but I’ll get back to those berges. The exhibit, sponsored by the coffee boutique company Nespresso, marks the tenth anniversary of […]
The photography curator at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris gives us a rare glimpse into the subjectivity of the curatorial process when (s)he comments (in the museum’s translation) that “naked bodies appear in disconcerting numbers” in the museum’s photographic collections. Indeed, it is not just the numbers of nude bodies the curator, and this viewer, […]
It is embarrassing to be so naive about the city I love best in the entire world (or warlord, as one of my kids used to say). In what have become annual visits, I shoot hundreds of photographs of the monuments, details, and faces of Paris. I think I have been stopped exactly once, and […]
The historian's lens 