On the Light of Paris

"I write with light and the light of Paris helped me express what I felt and what I feel: J’aime Paris" 

- André Kertész

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The Real Voyage of Discovery

Most people are often courteous of my taking photographs around the city. They wait until I take the shot or run across quickly... only every now and then is someone unhappy with my shooting, I'm in their way or they've had enough of the interminable amount of people taking photos of their beloved city so they make sure I know about it.

But the other morning in the Tuileries Gardens, I had a wonderfully rare encounter. A woman approached me with the most inquisitive face and asked why I was shooting so many photos of Paris' ubiquitous green chairs. I mentioned how symbolic of Paris they are (at least to me), how much I love their shape and form, and that I know others who feel the same way. Her puzzled face lit up into a smile... she said she never really looked at them in any special way, they were more or less utilitarian, spread throughout the city, always there. I shared how they were special to me, very often like companions on my photowalks. They seem to have a character of their own - alert and ready or lounging and tired. The one above I shot because it invited me to sit down and stay awhile, enjoy the view and the sunlight on this mild winter morning.

As we said our bonne journées, the woman began to walk away and then turned to take a long second look at the chairs and smiled. Like that wise Marcel Proust once said, "the real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but seeing with new eyes."

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Moments | Paris

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers 

and how one remembers it in order to recount it - Gabriel García Márquez

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Behind Panes of Glass

A man looking out of an open window never sees as much as the same man looking directly at a closed window. There is no object more deeply mysterious, no object more pregnant with suggestion, more insidiously sinister, in short more truly dazzling than a window lit up from within by even a single candle. What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming....  - Charles Baudelaire, Windows

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Summer & Nostalgia

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days... John Keats

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The end of summer + nostalgia. This post is dedicated to my family and friends back in the States, who I miss very much. I wish you were here...

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Make your life a dream...

Fais de ta vie un rêve, et d'un rêve, une réalité

[Make your life a dream, and a dream a reality] 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Morning Light

The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours.

No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, 

during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. 

And the fact that it practically always doesn’t, matters not a jot. 

The possibility is always there.

- Monica Baldwin

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Quote: the Promise...

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, 

but rather those days when out of dejection and despair 

you feel rise in you a challenge to life, 

and the promise of future accomplishments. 

― Gustave Flaubert

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The Poetry of Life...

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it ― Gustave Flaubert

These photos were taken a couple weeks ago on the morning my family left Gers (in southwest France) headed north to Paris. That morning seems like a lifetime ago… we had a 9-hour drive ahead of us, feeling heavy-hearted after saying goodbye to my husband's aging and ailing father. Several years ago, he traded in the rain and cold of Normandy for the warm rejuvenating sunlight of the South.

Driving away felt different this time, the light more luminous...

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Quote: On Reading... [Gustave Flaubert]

From Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary:

...what could be better, really, than an evening by the fire with a book, with the wind beating on the panes, the lamp burning?

Your head is empty,... the hours slip away. From the chair you wander through the countries of your mind, and your thoughts, threading themselves into the fiction, play about with the details or rush along the track of the plot. You melt into the characters; it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin.

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Waking up in Paris...

feeling nostalgic.

"There is never any ending to Paris..." - Hemingway

{ view from Vincent + Flo's apartment in the 10th arrondissement }

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Carte Postale :: The Oath of Spartacus - Paris

Le Serment de Spartacus by Louis-Ernest Barrias (1869)
Jardin des Tuileries - Paris

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, 

and so to make a few objects beautiful; 

but it is far more glorious to carve and paint 

the very atmosphere and medium through which we look...

To affect the quality of the day — that is the highest of arts.” 

- Henry David Thoreau

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Carte Postale :: Paris Rooftops | Les Toits de Paris

There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.

–Ernest Hemingway 

This photo of Paris' limestone buildings and mansard rooftops I shot from a seat on La Grande Roue (Ferris Wheel) - at the Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries. On the hilltop beyond is the Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart Basilica).

Discovering Paris by foot is my absolute preferred vantage point, but I love a bird's eye view and Paris gives us many opportunities for this! How about you, how do you like to discover a city?

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