Last time in Paris

Last time in Paris, I left the Musee Rodin and walked down boulevard des Invalides when a woman came hurrying towards me from the direction of the Metro.

She was so Paris.
I didn't have time to do anything other than wind on the film and shoot the Nikon from the hip but I made a picture.
The negative was overexposed and out of focus and her feet were 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 had 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 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 10th

Arriving at Roissy at 6.30 AM it was already 20 degrees. It was going to be a warm day. Joelle said that Paris could be sunny and hot in September. I was disappointed. I had 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 wasn't going to suit the kind of photographs I hoped to make. Some of my favourite photos were made by Robert Frank 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.

Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle Roissy airport looked pretty shabby by the time our luggage arrived and the airport train station looked even shabbier. Arriving at Gare du Nord it looked exhausted after a summer of travellers and after breakfast off a worn Formica café table that was sticky with humidity, we decided to walk the two kilometres to Montmartre in the 18th arrondisement. Paris is divided into 20 numbered districts; arrondissements spiralling out of the centre in a clockwise direction like a snail shell. Other than learning that low numbered arrondissements are in the city centre, the snail shell idea doesn't help very much. You need a good map. Walking was a blunder; footpaths and roads were under repair and didn't suit carting luggage. 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.

Often we stayed in the 11th arrondisement at Mary's Hotel, near Place de la Republique; affordable accommodation run by an Algerian family, but as this stay was longer than normal we found the place in avenue Rachel where we could cook. We hoped for a room with a view but the ground floor apartment was fine. As well as the stove and microwave it had a CD player and I‘d brought some CDs, Paul Kelly's latest and some jazz classics. Around the corner was a Monoprix supermarket and if you knocked a hole in the wall behind the apartment's divan bed you would step into a Montmartre Cemetery tomb. I'd been to Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise where Jim Morrison is buried and to Cimetiere Montparnasse where Baudelaire, author of The Flowers Of Evil is buried but I'd never been to Cimetiere de Montmartre, which was beautiful with its hilly topography.

Up rue Ravignan, the light rain persisted. Le Bateau-Lavoir in Place Emile Goudeau looked nothing like it did when Picasso painted Demoiselles d'Avignon but nevertheless I made a picture. Around the corner Place du Tertre looked the same as it did 30 years before but I didn't make a picture. Painter and model Suzanne Valadon was pictured naked in a photograph at the Musee de Montmartre. She took 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 were intense. The geraniums were so red they seemed to pulse. They looked 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 smashed.

The mint condition, hardly used, vintage, part of the history of photography, Kodak Diana seemed to float through the air like a piece of confetti. When it hit the cobblestones, it shattered. The lens wasn't damaged and the shutter worked, but a chunk of plastic had sheared from the top and part of the viewfinder had come unglued and rattled around inside. It was still possible to take pictures but when looking through the viewfinder the world was a complete blur. Rather than a huntress, Diana was 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 11th

Last time I sat in Notre Dame it was January. Night had fallen, it was deep winter, few tourists about and the vocalist had the voice of an angel. This time the vocalist was a man, it was morning, and his singing was earthly and there were many tourists about. The hum produced by the quietly spoken voices moving around the seated congregation was strangely reassuring. Hundreds of visitors passed through as I sat there. My map said the site of Notre Dame has been a place of devotion for more than 2000 years.

Over Cimetiere de Montmartre stretched the green steel bridge of rue Gaulaincourt. Along Samson avenue we found Francois Truffault's grave. It was plain and matter of fact. Just a slab of polished stone. A hand written note, sodden by drizzling rain and held down by small stones declared in English, "I love you Truffault."

In the late afternoon we set off for the Rex Cinema. At the corner of boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle and rue de la Lune we passed the bookstore that had a box of Max's books when I came through Paris from Sicily in 2000. There were still stocks of Max's books at the store. The Rex Cinema was a disappointment. I knew it from a black and white photograph in a book. The photograph pictured a scene from Gotham City, with the Rex, at night, film noir like and menacing. In late afternoon light, the Rex was just over looked and tired art deco. We sat at a café opposite, ordered drinks and waited for the Rex's lights to come on. Not all came on. Perhaps the Diana could do something?

Around the corner in rue du Faubourg Montmartre was the restaurant we had read about. It was packed and we were taken to a table for four already occupied by a young couple. We were about to spoil their evening so Joelle apologised. The food arrived quickly. The young man said locals knew the restaurant as a "jaw factory". It had a rapid turnover of patrons. My frites arrived cold. Colette said "you should never eat in a Paris restaurant on a Sunday'" The young man and young woman both spoke French, German and English. He would rather live in Berlin; less populated and less polluted than Paris. She lived in Berlin and was visiting Paris. He was writing a thesis on trust law. She had finished hers "about women and religion". I asked if she meant religion or just Christianity. "Just Catholicism from a feminist perspective". She hadn't read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae but she was reading Julia Kristeva. He claimed that more than half the men in French prisons were there for sex crimes. We talked about Roland Barthes and his book Camera Lucida and criticism's limited success in making sense of photography. Camera Lucida was the product of the muses of love and grief not semiotics. The young man said there was a good view of the Rex from the roof of the building where he lived.

Monday, September 12th

An attendant in a double-breasted suit the colour of dust, said that today was the last day photography would be permitted in the Louvre. The Louvre would be closed on Tuesday then on Wednesday photography would no longer be allowed. He said management wanted to sell more postcards. There will be trouble I thought when the photographie interdite signs go up. There was such a crush photographing the Venus de Milo from the front that I had to be content to make my pictures of her exposed back.

On Wednesday there will be a riot at the Louvre. Postcards don't have the relic like power of the homemade snap. It was the incomplete Venus De Milo that was the muse for much of Peter Fuller's thesis in Art and Psychoanalysis; a book proposing that aesthetic activity included acts of restitution in response to infantile and imaginary attacks on the bodies of women. Fuller leant heavily on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Klein believed that mother - child relations were primary in ego formation whereas for Freud it was father - child relations. Freud believed it was fear of fathers that shapes egos whereas for Klein it's the emotions of love, hate, and guilt. The world of Melanie Klein's infant is schizoid where objects bear the all or nothing qualities of bad or good. Bad objects are persecutory and hated; whereas good objects are loved. The infant has two mothers. The present and loved mother and the absent, hated mother. In phantasy, the ego attacks the hated mother. When the infant becomes aware that both the loved and hated mothers are the one and the same, the nature of loved objects becomes one of ambivalence. The infant experiences guilt for its damaging aggression and desires to restore the damaged loved object, the body of the mother. Peter Fuller believed that love - hate relationships provide the motivation for the production of art and perhaps for the crush of photographers in front of the un restored and damaged Venus de Milo at the Louvre.

Tuesday September 13 th

Paris is like a full belly with the Metro subterranean blood vessels stretching beneath its 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 was longer I could afford time walking. I was surprised to find that Place de la Madelaine, Place Vendome and Place Concorde were just minutes apart on foot. Place Vendome was where Lady Di left the Ritz and then crashed and Place Concorde was where Marie-Antoinette was guillotined. 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.

We watched the sun set over Concorde.

Wednesday, September 14th

Joelle's mother's, three hour train journey from Nancy to Gare de l'Est was delayed by one hour and fifteen minutes "du a un acte de malveillance." We bought a sandwich and waited. A young man asked customers at the sandwich bar for money. He appeared quietly agitated. A pigeon glided into the entry hall and landed on the floor. It was the same colour and pattern as the marble tiles. The pigeon looked like it had been painted by Magritte. Jacqueline's train arrived. She looked frail

Thursday, September 15th

A poster on the Metro passageway wall? I know the style but not the painting. It's by Gustave Moreau. His museum is only a 20-minute walk from avenue Rachel. I knew two of Moreau's paintings. The Apparition, pictures the disembodied, levitating head of John the Baptist and a finger pointing and scantily clad Salome who appears to be wearing flesh coloured high heels. The New Testament scene had its critics. Moreau was accused of being an opium smoker. The other painting I knew is Jupiter and Semele. It reminds me of the artwork of a 1970s Santana album. Jupiter and Semele looks like the product of a hallucinogen.

Jupiter / Zeus in the form of a mortal, had sex with Semele and she conceived and bore their son Dionysus. One day, Semele asked Zeus to reveal himself in his storm gathering, godly form and he consented. The revelation would be fatal for Semele so Zeus drew Dionysus from her side and placed him into his own thigh. Dionysus would become the patron saint of divine madness and the god of tragic drama. Dionysus also became a preoccupation for Friedrich Nietzsche's thought in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music published in 1872. The book proposed a wild side to Classical Greek culture.

Moreau's art was a fantastic and syncretic mix of Christian and pagan myth with unfinished femme fatale's on every wall. Surrealist writer Andre Breton visited the Musee Gustave Moreau as a 16 year old and Breton became a fan. Jacqueline bought me the catalogue.

Joelle's aunt, Colette took us to La Taroudant II, a Tunisian restaurant in rue Capucine. Colette had worked in Tunisia and knew the food.

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

Joelle, Jacqueline and Colette dipped sugar cubes into fig liquor as we sat amongst flashing fairy lights, tiles like Byzantine mosaics, brass teapots, stained glass lampshades, long barrelled rifles and daggers. La Tarouant II was 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. At 7.30 pm I'm sitting on a bench on the corner of rue Des Saules and rue Cortot with my 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 16th



The sky is grey and it's raining. I have a long walk to rue du Quatre Septembre and the Bourse. The rain is steady so into the Monoprix to buy an umbrella. I stand behind a scrawny young man who was talking to a 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 spoiled the Greek temple look and the drizzling rain continued all the way back to avenue Rachel.

We had lunch with Bertrand at Restaurant Tifinagh. Tifinagh was well worn and authentic. High school students with their hand rolling tobacco occupied one table and a couple occupied another. The woman was from Brassai's book, The Secret Paris of the 30s. She had peroxide green hair, smoked tailor made cigarettes from a red packet and was wearing an over designed pink leather jacket. She never smiled as she talked. Her male companion nodded between bites of cake off a fork. She was probably a local. I saw her up at rue Lepic a few days later.

A huge full moon rose over Sacre - Coeur that evening.

Saturday, September 17th

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. We fix Jacqueline's rail ticket then 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. I don't like Main Montparnasse; it's an urban renewal project that hasn't worked. The 19th century railway stations of Paris are landmarks but not the office like building of Gare Montpanasse. 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.

The enthusiasm of the staff at the Musee Bourdelle was unconvincing like the sculpture. Boudelle was a student of Rodin yet his work was cold and bore the gestures of automats. While I don't see love in Rodin's work there is passion. Bourdelle's work had the look that became the template for war memorials and Stalin's monuments.

Down 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 graves will be on the right. I had already imagined the photo. It would be simple and it wouldn't matter if the sky wasn't overcast. Dappled sunlight on the wall behind would be ok. I would get back and keep the tombstones vertical and make the scene look flat like a Walker Evans picture. The significance of the graves would carry the photograph, I wouldn't have to do anything tricky. But there was only one tombstone. Sartre and de Beauvoir were buried in the same grave. It was not what I had imagined. I remembered two, side by side tomb stones. But Simone was buried on top of Jean-Paul. I waited while two young women made their photos of each other. They asked me to photograph them together. A lone woman arrived and placed a single long stemmed rose on the grave. I didn't want a rose on the grave.

We left Cimetiere du Montparnasse, arrived at Metro Raspail, walked down the stairs where Lee Miller met Man Ray and then took the Metro to the 3rd arrondisement to see Bill Brandt. Bill Brandt Photographies was 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."

I find Brandt's nudes are cold. The Policeman's Daughter's nakedness is something to bear. I was taken back to scenes from a movie I saw some 40 years before. Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1965) and Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) were a double feature at a suburban, Perth drive-in circa 1966. 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. Typing now (May, 2006) I wondered who was the actress who played the pawnbroker's wife? A web site suggested that a Thelma Oliver played the part of the beautiful wife. "Do you want to see Thelma Oliver nude?" prompts the Mr Skin – Nude Celebrity Expert web site.

Brandt was a fan of the cinema of German Expressionism and I read in Telerama that Bill Brandt was also an Orson Welles fan. Luc Desbenoit (2005) wrote 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 asked of Brandt; "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?"

After the Brandt exhibition we wandered through the 3rd arrondisement towards Musee Picasso and I thought of how Repulsion and The Pawn Broker had been an impressive double and how Catherine Deneuve was so Paris. The Picasso Museum was closed, something about security, so being a sunny, Saturday afternoon, and with the Diana at the ready we set off for the café lined, grassed square of Place Des Vosges and Café Hugo to over hear young women speak of love affairs.

Sunday, September 18th

Sunday morning there are 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. I buy our bread and then head home for breakfast with Nat King Cole and Sweet Lorraine.

Sunday afternoon we crossed the Seine on Alexandre III and headed for the Left Bank for a rendezvous with Prue and Ross. It was a free day at the museums and government buildings were open to the public. There were people everywhere. On Alexandre III, wedding photographers plied their trade and I took out the Diana to photograph the posing couples. The sun was bright and a groom's shadow sliced across the face of his bride. She appeared to have no nose making her face look like a skull.

Down boulevard St Germain we passed Sartre's haunts the Café des Deux Margots and Café de Flore. The cafes were packed and people posed to be photographed out front. Down boulevard Raspail, a red dress on a headless mannequin made me reach for the Diana.

We met Ross and Prue in the lounge of Hotel Lutetia. Ross said room service had horse burgers on the menu. A man sitting nearby went through a lengthy ritual to light up a big, fat cigar. His lighter ran out of gas and he asked the waiter for matches. His companion lit up too. It was unusual seeing a woman smoke a cigar. I imagined they were Texas oil millionaires. We spent the evening with Ross and Prue at A la Petite Chaise, the oldest restaurant in Paris. We ignored Colette's advice about not eating in Parisian restaurants on Sundays.

Monday, September 19th

A busker violinist at Place Pigalle Metro played Edith Piaf's La Vie en Rose. We caught the Metro for Maubert Mutualite and the Pantheon - another beautiful, Greek temple like building. Then down 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, Meditation Avec Bras. Adam was nearby and I thought the Meditation sculpture was Eve. She looked like she 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 Meditation Avec Bras; vulnerability rendered in plastic clay and cast in enduring bronze.

We had lunch at a café amongst the trees then wandered through the gardens. The Statue of Liberty received the Diana treatment. We strolled down boulevard St Michel, caught the Metro to Chateau Rouge, walked up to Sacre-Coeur, down rue du Calvaire and down to La Villa des Abbesses. I paid 4.00 euro for 25 cl of Heineken, watched a man dressed in fox hunting garb, stop and pick up a cigarette butt, light up and continue down rue des Abbesses, then I returned to avenue Rachel.

Tuesday, September 20th

We left for Nancy with Jacqueline.

One Evening in Nancy

The light was failing as through the window of Café du Foy, I noticed a young woman standing in the centre of Place Stanislas by the monument. She was wearing a dark jacket and skirt, like the kind of uniforms shop assistants wear in department stores. Her dark hair was tied back. She wore a large red scarf around her shoulders. She was wearing flat-heeled shoes. Her arms were folded, impatient with the cold. One leg was bent; the other straight supporting the weight of her body. I wanted to make a picture. However a companion arrived and she left the square.

Saturday, October 8th

Back in Paris we stayed the night at Hotel Little Regina, just over the road from Gare de l' Est. We had dinner at a café next to Canal St Martin and with Hotel Du Nord nearby I felt like I was in a movie set. A young woman seated with a group of friends on the side walk made the foreground for a picture. She asked if I was a photographer and she said the canal was very famous. Around the corner from Hotel Little Regina was 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.

The lights of Hotel Lorraine's sign weren't on so I didn't take a picture.

It's 7.30 am and I have an hour and a half to fill in before we take the taxi to Roissy. It has been a month since arriving and today we are leaving. I've just come back from a stroll down boulevard de Strasbourg. The pre dawn light was electric blue. Standing on the corner gazing down rue du 8 Mai 1945, I became lost in my thoughts and farted loudly. A street cleaner looked at me shocked. I wasn't wearing Hades' helmet of invisibility. A storekeeper rinsed 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. Now, 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 degrees. We leave Paris in an hour.

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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.
Fuller, P. (1980). Art and Psychoanalysis. London: Writers and Readers.
Frank, R. (2005). Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia. (Tucker. A, Ed.). Gottingen: Steidl.
Mathieu, P., & Lacambre, G., & Forest, M. (2005). The Gustave Moreau Museum. Paris: Edition de la Réunion des musées nationaux.