Paris at Dawn

I really started paying attention to Paris when I first met Di. We were hanging out a lot in LA and decided to give each other books to read. I gave her the Hobbit and she gave me A Moveable Feast.

She reneged and refused to read further than a page, thus ending a whole genre of potential conversational subjects about fantasy-fiction. I, though, read her choice, and loved it. It got me into Hemingway in a big way.

When I moved to London that following summer Di and I immediately took off for Paris, where it seemed we ate not only 3 good meals a day but also croque monsieurs whenever we saw them. For me, Paris was a love affair with food, but not much else.

Paris didn’t move me in a big way as a city to photograph. It was too pretty and quaint. Too dainty. I love edgy – I love beautiful too, of course – but I like some grit mixed in, something that tells me about life.

I was, though, convinced by several people to do a book about Paris, and after a few weeks of really exploring the city I found plenty of grit and interesting urban life, as well as being charmed by the prettiness of the place too. I think my book ended up being pretty awesome actually.

“When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.” Henry Miller

While working on the book my family and I stayed for a few months in Barbes Rochechouart – in a huge artist’s studio that had a little flat built into it. A very different area to what I had experienced on my little weekends away in Paris.

The area of Barbès has a couple of big noisy food markets selling north and west African ingredients, lots of African fabric shops, amazing cafes serving tagines and delicious kebabs – and one of my favourite shops that only sold big boxes of fresh herbs, which made for a beautiful smelling experience when I walked past at dawn. It was a world away from the touristy places I’d stayed in before.

We were there for a few months when our daughter was a baby, and some days we would stay in the studio all day, listening to the slow beat of the sound of rain on the glass roof and old jazz records left by the artist-owner.

The photos I took then are woven in with this experience of my daughter’s early; she ate her first food here and learnt to walk at 8 months old in Paris!

We had my son’s 7th birthday there, celebrated partly by doing a tour of the train station where he would watch the big French and European trains coming and going at all hours of the day and night.