boy at fountain
menu board
house detail
wall mural
Paris is my favorite city in the entire world. I love the culture, the language, the people, the food, and the beauty of the city. Paris is the photography center of the world. Photography was invented there by Louis Daguerre in 1839. Many of my all time favorite photographers have lived or worked in Paris or are living there now, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Richard Avedon and Sebastaio Salgado. But countless other great photographers have moved through that magical city. So I wanted to create a photography project in Paris that would reflect other photo-artists before me and add my own unique twist to the mix. I spent a month on this project so I rented an apartment in the 19th district (arrondissement). I chose this area because it was away from the touristy areas of the city and out in a real neighborhood with local people, local foods, and local culture. Since the Metro system is so great it was easy to get around each day. My project was to cover Paris through photographs using a romantic, turn of the 20th century look. I was after something relating to the Pictorialist style. The Pictorialists were part of a movement lead by Alfred Stieglitz in 1890 to get photography accepted as a true art form. Some people would argue that this battle is still going on today. Stieglitz had the idea that if photographs looked more like paintings and covered similar subject matter, then they would more easily be accepted as art. So the Pictorialist style was born in which you see a great deal of Impressionistic views of nude figures, landscapes, and still lifes with components like blur, grain, soft focus, and non-silver based printing methods including platinum, palladium, and cyanotype. You can read more about the Pictorialist movement in my post, ‘The Photography of Edward Steichen‘.
So my task each day was to go to a different district and to record images. This is a very reportage approach to photography which was made famous by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz. I just wandered around and looked for interesting things going on; people, buildings, light, shadow. I was really a great way to see the city and many of its minute details. For me this is just the start of this project. I plan to go back and cover more types of shots. I would like to do more nighttime photographs in the style of Brassai. I am sure that I will have not trouble finding people who want to go with me.
Gary Miller
Houston Fine Art Wedding Photographer
Eye Candy and Brain Veggies
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[...] set out to get photography accepted as an art form. I have spoken about this before in ‘We Will Always Have Paris‘ and ‘The Photography of Edward Steichen‘. For those of you who we absent that [...]
[...] Daguerre in Paris and William Henry Fox Talbot in London. You can read more about this in ‘We Will Always Have Paris‘, and in ‘Photography and What is Art?‘ Little has changed in the principle of [...]
[...] photography borrowed the Impressionist look in the form of Pictorialism (see ‘We Will Always Have Paris‘). So the two art media feed off of each other and laid the groundwork for future art [...]
[...] of photography in my posts ‘Something Old, Something New in Photography‘, ‘We Will Always Have Paris‘, and ‘Photography and What is Art?.’ But being an amateur photographer today [...]