All in Architecture
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Landscapes have been difficult this week--grey skies and limestone buildings do not make for great photographs. Unlike summertime, there is about 10 minutes to play with the dusk sky. It had just started to rain when this photograph was made. A straight-up shot of the Seine, with the banks of the Île Saint-Louis visible. We were standing on the Pont Lois-Philippe.
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Today I concentrated my efforts in one quarter of the cemetery for 3.5 hours. Never made it to Oscar Wilde's or Edith Piaf's monuments. Nor was able to help a nice lady find Chopin's grave. I did run into Collette. I also ran into one of the victims of the terrorist attack last year November at the Bataclan.
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Not much to say about this photograph. We were in the 16th Arrondissement, visiting Musée Marmottan Monet, which holds the largest collection of Monet paintings in the world, thanks in large part to Monet's last surviving son, who donated the paintings to the museum.
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Sometimes your best shot is behind you. I was standing outside a restaurant, looking toward the Eiffel Tower, which is probably one of the most photographed structures in the world. Evelyn saw what I was up to, and said, look at the reflection in the restaurant's front door.
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Bad weather usually enhances a photograph of an iconic structure. This photograph was shot from the Printemps Department Store's 9th floor rooftop on a foggy, but somewhat balmy Sunday the week before Christmas.
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Picasso's cubism can be viewed as a reaction to the Impressionists. While they focused on brush strokes, he focused on volume. This photograph was made from the third floor of the Picasso Museum in Paris. The thick and wavy glass, together with all of its imperfections, account for the abstraction. Some of the photographs that I made while visiting the museum are reflections in plexiglass-glass display cases of the views from the windows. The building was just as interesting as the collections and exhibits that it houses.
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The afternoon sun can create such pleasure and simultaneously such danger. Some of my favorite movies are from Jean-Pierre Melville and Jules Daassin--Le Doulos, Le Deuxieme Souffle, Le Flambur, and Riffi.
In actuality, this photograph was made in Frank's Gehry's building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
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Friday night one week before Christmas, we walked from the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, down the Av. des Champs-Élysées, through the Christmas Market (before the Berlin truck incident), through the Louvre, down and the Rue de Rivoli, and through the Marais, until we stopped at Benedict for dinner seated at the bar. It seemed like the entire city was out walking, shopping, and eating. Nothing says Paris quite like the Eiffel Tower and the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile.
