Paris is a city to snap… it is a city of endless surprises, especially visual. I am always snapping when I am in Paris… the camera is around my neck and ready to go.. Strangely enough, I never have the urge to take my camera out in other cities the way I do in Paris. I think it is the unexpected… and it is always the visual for me… For example, this amazing women above… She walked out of an apartment building in the sixth arrondissement, all Lady Gaga-like… hair flowing, cigarette smouldering… her style and confidence off the charts… I had a split second to catch her… and she was far too purposeful to ask for a pose… She is as she was…
Graffiti is another of my snap happies… Paris is full of graffiti… the good and the bad… but never the dull… I enjoy the street art…. the instillations… the tromp l’oeil effects… like the one above… A ‘sign writer’ and his suggestion that we ‘ be wary of words’…
And the dogs… I never get tired of the Parisians and their pooches… this woman, walking the dogs… so smart and chic… no tracksuit and trainers here in the fourth.
‘Praise be to Prada’… I wondered who would have written this… It could have been me… I am a big fan of Miuccia Parada…except that I am no vandal! I can’t imagine the ‘artist’ would be a Prada fan… Contradictions… that is what I love about Paris…. Contradictions, they are everywhere…
I notice that my photographs, over time, have a similar feel to each other… The pups. the women, the bicycles… the shop windows, the graffiti. the architecture and the flowers… there are so many beautiful flowers in Paris… I can’t stop… I click the same subjects year after year. Is it that these visuals resonate with me? Or is it that this is how I see Paris?
I believe that we all have our own ‘eye’… our own way of looking… at the big picture and the small pictures… When we take photographs we are preserving not only our surroundings but some of our thoughts and feelings… Our photographs encapsulate not only our chosen subjects but who we are… a window into our aesthetic, our dreams and our spirit… xv
