Last time in Paris; leaving the Musee Rodin and walking along boulevard des Invalides, a woman came hurrying from the direction of the Metro. She was so Paris. Having no time to do anything other than wind on the film and shoot the Nikon from the hip I made a picture. The negative was overexposed and out of focus, her feet cut off, but I liked the print very much. A rushing Camille Claudel scurrying by. As the best photos often aren’t intended, this time I brought to Paris a borrowed, Kodak Diana. A toy like camera, with a plastic lens, that leaks light, unevenly exposes film, overlaps frames and produces softly focussed, hazy, whimsical and often unintended images. And so when light and things and locations don’t conspire to create a picture, the Diana perhaps could come up with something. Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt and the Greeks knew her as Artemis. Artemis and Apollo were twins and both were archers. Apollo spread disease with his arrows while Artemis shot bad women with hers. She shot them with arrows that moaned.

Saturday, September 10

Roissy Airport, 6.30 am, already 20 degrees, going to be a warm day. Joelle said that Paris could be sunny and hot in September. I’m disappointed. I’d hoped for Autumn weather; overcast skies, people wrapped in overcoats disappearing around corners, threatening storm clouds over the Pantheon, car headlights reflecting off wet roads, those kinds of fugitive things. Photography is so good at arresting things on the run. Summer weather isn’t going to suit the kinds of photographs I hope to make. Some of my favourite photos were made by Robert Frank. Frank’s book Paris and he photographed in London in the early 1950s. Hazy, grey streets, dark suits, in his photos you can feel the chill air. I remember a walk along the Thames in Richmond in 1975. It was foggy, cold and I had borrowed Joelle’s fur coat. But that would have been November, not September.

Gare du Nord is exhausted following a summer of travellers. After breakfast off a worn Formica café table sticky with humidity we walk the two kilometres to Montmartre. Along rue de Dunkerque, right into boulevard Magenta, left into boulevard de Rochechourt, continue into boulevard de Clichy, past Place Pigalle and Place Blanche, the Moulin Rouge, Corcoran’s Irish Pub then right into avenue Rachel and down to number 16. If you knocked a hole in the wall behind the apartment’s divan bed you would step into a Montmartre Cemetery tomb. I’d visited Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise where Jim Morrison is buried and Cimetiere Montparnasse where Baudelaire, author of The Flowers Of Evil is buried but I’m yet to visit Cimetiere de Montmartre.

Climbing rue Ravignan, the light rain persists. At the Musee de Montmartre, painter and model Suzanne Valadon is pictured naked in a photograph. She took composer, Erik Satie for a lover but it didn’t last. Satie would yearn for her next door at 6 rue Cortot. The colours of the flowers in the garden at Musee de Montmartre are intense. The geraniums so red they pulse. They are full of blood. In rue Lepic, in front of Moulin de la Galette, where the owner’s body was crucified on the windmill’s sails, the borrowed Diana smashes. The hardly used, part of the history of photography, Kodak Diana floats through the air like a piece of confetti, strikes the cobblestones and shatters. The lens isn’t damaged and the shutter works, but a chunk of plastic has sheared from the top and part of the viewfinder has become unglued and rattles around inside. It’s still possible to take pictures but looking through the viewfinder the world is a complete blur. Rather than a huntress, the Diana has been reduced to the Cyclops whose one eye was put out by Odysseus; the Cyclopes, the creatures that fashioned the helmet that made Hades, god of death, invisible.

Sunday, September 11

Last time in Notre Dame it was January, night had fallen, deep winter, few tourists about and the vocalist had the voice of an angel. This morning, the vocalist is a man, the singing earthly and there are many tourists about. The hum produced by the quietly spoken voices moving around the seated congregation is strangely reassuring. My map says the site of Notre Dame has been a place of devotion for more than 2000 years.

Over Cimetiere de Montmartre stretches the green steel bridge of rue Gaulaincourt. Along Samson avenue is Francois Truffault’s plain, matter of fact grave. Just a slab of polished stone. A hand written note, sodden by drizzling rain and held down by small stones declares in English, “I love you Truffault.”

Late afternoon, off to the Rex Cinema. Passing the corner of boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle and rue de la Lune there’s the bookstore that had a box of Max’s books when I came through Paris from Sicily in 2000. There are still stocks of Max’s books in the store. The Rex Cinema is a disappointment. I know it from a black and white photograph that pictures a scene from Gotham City, with the Rex, at night, film noir like and menacing. In this late afternoon light, the Rex is just over looked and tired art deco. Sitting at the café opposite, we order drinks and wait for the Rex’s lights to come on. Not all come on. Perhaps the Diana can do something?

Around the corner in rue du Faubourg Montmartre is the restaurant Joelle had read about. It’s packed, we are taken to a table for four already occupied by a young couple. We are about to spoil their evening. Joelle apologises. The food arrives quickly. The young man says locals know the restaurant as the jaw factory. It has a rapid turnover of patrons. My frites arrive cold. Colette said you should never eat in a Paris restaurant on a Sunday. The young man and young woman both speak French, German and English. He would rather live in Berlin; less populated and less polluted than Paris. She lives in Berlin and is visiting Paris. He is writing a thesis on trust law. She has finished hers about women and religion. I ask if she means religion or just Christianity. Just Catholicism from a feminist perspective. She hasn’t read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae but she is reading Julia Kristeva. He claims that more than half the men in French prisons are there for sex crimes. We talk about Roland Barthes and his book Camera Lucida, a book about photos as wounds rather than as signs. The young man says there is a good view of the Rex from the roof of the building where he lives.

Monday, September 12

An attendant in a double-breasted suit the colour of dust, says today is the last day photography will be permitted in the Louvre. The Louvre will be closed on Tuesday then on Wednesday photography will no longer be allowed. He says management wants to sell more postcards.

Tuesday September 13

Paris is a full belly, the Metro subterranean blood vessels stretching beneath taut skin carrying sight-devouring tourists from attraction to attraction. Normally I’m only in Paris for a couple of days and a sense of urgency keeps me underground on the Metro. But as this visit is longer time is affoded to walk. It’s a surprise to find that Place de la Madelaine, Place Vendome and Place Concorde are just minutes apart on foot. Place Vendome, where Lady Di left the Ritz and then crashed. Place Concorde where Marie-Antoinette lost her head. Paris can be rough on royalty. When the history of violence is written, Paris will be good for a couple of chapters. Templar Knights burnt at the stake, bishops tortured on the grill, St Dennis carrying his martyred head through the streets of Montmartre, The Terror, The Commune, the Gestapo knocking on your door, Lady Di’s car crash. The sun sets over Concorde.

Wednesday, September 14

Jacqueline’s three-hour train journey from Nancy to Gare de l’Est is delayed by one hour and fifteen minutes “du a un acte de malveillance.” We buy a sandwich and wait. A young man asks customers at the bar for money. He is quietly agitated. A pigeon glides into the entry hall and lands on the floor. It is the same colour and pattern as the marble tiles. The pigeon has been painted by Rene Magritte. Jacqueline’s train arrives. She looks frail.

Thursday, September 15 

Colette takes us to La Taroudant II, a Tunisian restaurant in rue Capucine. Colette had worked in Tunisia and knows the food.

Couscous au mechoui avec merguez
Vin marocain rose (guerrouane)
Desert – le mystere (ice cream)

We sit amongst flashing fairy lights, tiles like Byzantine mosaics, brass teapots, stained glass lampshades, long barrelled rifles and daggers. Joelle, Jacqueline and Colette dip sugar cubes into fig liquor. La Tarouant II is named after an oasis.

The bell rings at the cemetery, its 5.45 pm, time for visitors to leave. The sun will be setting in 2 hours. 7.30 pm sitting on a bench on the corner of rue Des Saules and rue Cortot with the Nikon on my lap, I’m asked if I know where Vincent Van Gogh lived.

Around the corner at 54 rue Lepic.
I’m asked what I’m doing?
I’m waiting for the streetlights to come on.
I’m told last night they came on at 8.15 pm.

Friday, September 16

The sky is grey it’s raining. The walk long to rue du Quatre Septembre and the Bourse. The rain is steady so into the Monoprix to buy an umbrella. A scrawny young man talks to the matronly cash register operator. He is quietly spoken and repeats his request a couple of times. She finally understands. He wants sex she says. The French flag on the roof of the Bourse spoils the Greek temple look and the drizzling rain continues all the way back to avenue Rachel.

Lunch is with Bertrand at well worn and authentic Restaurant Tifinagh. High school students hand rolling cigaretttes occupy one table and a couple occupies another. The woman is from Brassai’s book, The Secret Paris of the 30s. She has peroxide green hair, smokes tailor made cigarettes from a red packet and is wearing an over designed pink leather jacket. She never smiles as she talks. Her male companion nods between bites of cake off a fork. She is probably a local. I see her up at rue Lepic a few days later.

A huge full moon rises over Sacre – Coeur.

Saturday, September 17

The sun is shining but it’s cold, so different to the sticky and hot morning of a week ago. The taxi ride to Gare de l’Est is slow due to the road works. Finished fixing Jacqueline’s rail ticket we catch the Metro to Montparnasse to visit the Musee Bourdelle. Looking in the windows of parked cars, military personnel with machine guns patrol the streets of Main Montparnasse. Old Montparnasse was named after the sacred mountain where Apollo entertained his muses. On boulevard Montparnasse, Andre Kertesz sat at a table at the Café du Dome and brokered editorial photographic work for magazines like Detective. To illustrate Detective, Kertesz, Brassai and Bill Brandt re-staged crime scenes.

Boudelle was a student of Rodin yet his work is cold and bears the gestures of automats. While I don’t see love in Rodin’s work there is passion. Bourdelle’s work has the look that became the template for war memorials and Stalin’s monuments.

Along boulevard Edgar Quinet, in through the main gate of Cimetiere du Montparnasse. Turn right into the first division and avenue du Boulevart and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s shared grave is on the right. I wait as two young women make their photos of each other. They ask me to photograph them together. A lone woman arrives and places a single long stemmed rose on the grave. Arriving at Metro Raspail, walking down the stairs where Lee Miller met Man Ray we take the Metro to the 3^rd arrondisement to see Bill Brandt. Bill Brandt Photographies is at Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debellyme. Robert Frank had seen Brandt’s pictures in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Frank wrote, I heard a sound, and a feeling inside me woke up. Reality became mystery. To see these nudes is wonderful . . . . I’ve felt the whiteness of the skin before, I’ve looked at a woman’s body with desire and it became love making and later habit. Here in that cold museum the same familiar feelings return.

Brandt’s nudes are cold. The Policeman’s Daughter’s nakedness is something to bear. I’m taken back to scenes from a movie I saw 40 years before. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) were a double feature at a suburban drive-in. I would have been sixteen. Repulsion and The Pawnbroker were both black and white movies. Repulsion was not what I expected. It was a paranoia horror movie, a genre I wasn’t familiar with starring French actress, Catherine Deneuve. If I had seen the movie poster I would have read, The nightmare world of a Virgin’s dreams becomes the screen’s shocking reality. The Pawn Broker was a holocaust survivor movie and starred Rod Steiger playing the role of New York, pawn broker Sol Nazerman. In flash back, the pawnbroker’s beautiful wife was assigned to a brothel in a Nazi death camp. I remember scenes of routine dread reminiscent of the air of Brandt’s The Policeman’s Daughter.

Brandt was a fan of the cinema of German Expressionism I read in Telerama Bill Brandt was also an Orson Welles fan. Luc Desbenoit (2005) writes that Brandt believed he understood Welles’ aphoristic, The camera is much more than a recording machine. It is a medium through which messages from other worlds travel. And Desbenoit asks; Ne dit-il pas qu’il “photographie des souvenirs”, pas ce qu’ il voir? Doesn’t he say he photographs memories not what he sees?

Wandering through the 3^rd arrondisement towards Musee Picasso, I recall how Repulsion and The Pawn Broker had been an impressive double and how Catherine Deneuve was so Paris. The Picasso Museum is closed, something about security. We set off for the café lined, grassed square of Place Des Vosges and Café Hugo to over hear young women speak of their love affairs.

Sunday, September 18

Sunday morning with no patisseries open at Place Blanche, so across the bridge to the leafy part of rue Callaincourt where the shopkeepers aren’t as friendly as those at Place Blanche. With our bread I return for breakfast with Nat King Cole and Sweet Lorraine.

Sunday afternoon we cross the Seine on Alexandre III on our way to the Left Bank. On picturesque Alexandre III, wedding photographers ply their trade. On boulevard St Germain we pass Sartre’s haunts the Café des Deux Margots and Café de Flore. The cafes are packed and people pose to be photographed out front. On boulevard Raspail, a red dress on a headless mannequin makes me reach for the Diana. We spend the evening at A la Petite Chaise, the oldest restaurant in Paris and ignore Colette’s advice about not eating in Parisian restaurants on Sundays. The onion soup is delicious.

Monday, September 19

The busker violinist at Place Pigalle Metro plays Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. Exiting Maubert Mutualite then the Pantheon, another beautiful, Greek temple.. Then to Jardin du Luxembourg to find The Statue of Liberty. There are at least two in Paris. It was in Jardin du Luxembourg where I first saw Rodin’s, Eve. Adam was nearby. Eve was walking away from something terrible. I made pictures with my twin lens Rollieflex and when I developed the film the skies were blemished, damaged. Must have been something in the bathroom water that I used to process the film. I don’t care for Rodin’s chiselled and smoothed marble sculptures but I do care for his bronzes, especially Eve; vulnerability fashioned in clay then cast in enduring bronze.

We lunch at a café amongst the trees and wander through the gardens. The Statue of Liberty receives the Diana treatment. We stroll along boulevard St Michel, take the Metro to Chateau Rouge, climb up to Sacre-Coeur, down rue du Calvaire and down to La Villa des Abbesses. 4.00 euros buys 25 cl of Heineken. A man dressed in fox hunting garb, stops, picks up a cigarette butt, lights up and continues down rue des Abbesses.

Tuesday, September 20

 We leave for Nancy with Jacqueline.

 One Evening in Nancy

 From Café du Foy through the failing light I notice a young woman standing in the centre of Place Stanislas by the monument. She wears a dark jacket and skirt, like the kind of uniforms shop assistants wear in department stores. Her dark hair tied back she wears a large red scarf around her shoulders. She is wearing flat-heeled shoes. Her arms are folded, impatient with the cold. One leg is bent; the other straight supporting the weight of her body. I want to make a picture. However a companion arrives, she leaves.

Saturday, October 8

Returning to Paris we stay the night at Hotel Little Regina, just over the road from Gare de l’ Est. We have dinner at a café next to Canal St Martin and with Hotel Du Nord nearby I feel like I’m in a movie set. A young woman seated with a group of friends on the side walk makes the foreground for a picture. She asks if I am a photographer and she says the canal is very famous. Around the corner from Hotel Little Regina is Hotel Lorraine, which was the first Paris Hotel I stayed in. It was 1976 and we stayed over night before travelling to Nancy for Joelle’s, grandmother’s birthday. I wasn’t invited. I remember we visited Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise and I saw a bronze tombstone drawn on by Marc Chagall. The first time I slept in Paris was in 1975 in a Kombi van.

Hotel Lorraine’s sign isn’t lit. I put away the camera.

It’s 7.30 am. A storekeeper rinses urine out of his doorway with a bucket of soapy water. It’s 8 am and the light is an even grey now. The promise and anticipation of twilight has gone. Looking down from the fourth floor window, I notice the pale lavender of a discarded Metro ticket on the pavement. The TV says the minimum was 11 degrees and the maximum will be 21. We leave Paris in an hour.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida. (R. Howard Trans.). New York: Hill and Wang.
Delany, P. (2004). Bill Brandt: a life. London: Jonathan Cape.
Desbenoit, L. (2005, September 28). Un oeil d’aigle. Telerama, 59-60.
Frank, R. (2005). Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia. (Tucker. A, Ed.). Gottingen: Steidl.