Paris! City of High Spirits and Old Ghosts
Two illustrated books, one from 2017 and one from the early 1900's
The headlines this week have used up my emotional energy.
For example, Florida state Senator Blaise Ingoglia sponsored a bill to ban the Democratic Party. And, Sean Hannity said it’s actually all the other media that’s being dishonest, not Fox News.
It’s time to book an armchair vacation.
I’ve never been to Paris. But I’ve read so much about French artists and writers that leafing through illustrated books about the city seems like revisiting old haunts.
A Paris Year is a lighthearted journal filled with Janice MacLeod’s notes, photos and drawings. She says Paris is a walking city and her book is a stroll through the streets and through the seasons. If you’re looking for a relaxing bedside book, this might be it.
She notes that when you see an “N” engraved on bridges and buildings, you wonder which Napoleon it refers to. The emperor or the architectural mastermind?
Above: “Angelina’s café serves the world’s finest hot chocolate,” MacLeod writes. “I watch the old gents and dames on display, the men in suits, the ladies draped in jewels.”
The author made a friend through an online meetup group, and arranged to meet her at Chez Julien. She found that the French sense of time is not as precise as an American’s.
Shown above is a public bicycle stand. The Paris bike sharing system is called Vélib', a combination of ("bicycle") and liberté ("freedom"). You buy a subscription; the first 30 minutes of your trip are free, with no limit to the number of trips you take in a day.
MacLeod’s classic French baguette in A Paris Year reminds me of another book of a different period, in a much different mood, Eugène Atget’s Paris.
The black and white photos in Atget: Paris were taken in the late 1890’s and the early 1900’s. The book’s dust jacket says that Eugène Atget was not the best photographer of Paris, but he was the first modern one. He was obsessive in recording the city’s streets and suburbs, leaving us thousands of snapshots of daily life, the essence of the city.
But portraits of people, which I’ve favored above, were unusual for Atget. Most of his photographs were of deserted streets and buildings.
It has been said,
Atget’s Paris often appears devoid of people partly due to his photographic method. Dry plate technology had freed photographers from the studio, but these plates were still quite ’slow’, requiring longer exposure times. So if people in the scene moved they became blurs, ghostly half-captured outlines, or were not recognized by the camera as figures at all.
In a time of rapid progress, Atget stuck with the old large, slow wooden camera, a heavy burden to carry across Paris. Many of his photographs retained their ghostly mirages to a lesser or greater degree.
This pair of books reminds me that Paris is different for everyone who has a different viewpoint, for the tourist, the shopkeeper, the streetcleaner, the elected official, the taxpayer, the refugee, the student, the soldier, and for the armchair traveler, me. And isn’t there a kind of Paris everywhere?
What a lovely travelogue, Deada..as well as a respite.
Hi Deda, Your article about the beauty of Paris, through seeing photos in books, brought back my memories of my trip to Italy in 2015. I think traveling anywhere in Europe is a feast for ones senses. The sights to see, the sounds to hear, the different foods to smell and taste all excite me. As I walked across a bridge in Venice or down a street in Rome or Capri, I was able to touch the century old stone, touch the beautiful carvings on a door and actually touch the stone wall in a beautiful blue grotto, when the captain of the boat backed in to the grotto and said, " Go ahead and touch it". I was the only one from our tour group who wanted to sit at the back of the Ferry boat.
You show many photos of doors & doorways. I found doors were one of my favorite photo subjects. Each one is a story in itself.
I could go on & on about my trip with my husband to Italy. I would love to go there again.
There are many more places to see, never enough time or money. TV, the internet and books will have to due for my travel thirst.
Best wishes to you and your family, Rosa