Two months based in Montmartre. Every weekday, two hours of photography walking through the neighborhood and outward into the city — no agenda, no location list, just looking. This is what I found.
The exercise was intentional: I wanted to show you mine — not the Paris you’d find in a guidebook, but Paris as it actually exists between the tourist moments. The lampposts at 6am. The café chairs being lifted off tables before the city wakes. The way light hits the Metro steps differently on overcast days versus clear ones.
The Method
Monday through Friday, I walked for approximately two hours. The route changed every day but the starting point — the Montmartre stairs — was fixed. I carried the Canon R6 Mark II for digital and a Canon Rebel 2000 with Kodak Portra 400 for film. Post-processing was limited to Lightroom adjustments for color and white balance only; no heavy compositing or AI cleanup.
What I Was Looking For
Genuine reactions. Unstaged moments. The things Paris does when nobody’s paying attention to it — which is never, but there are degrees. The window of the unguarded moment.
The city rewards close attention. People notice lampposts; I tried to photograph how the lamppost relates to the building behind it, the person passing beneath it, the time of day it was designed for. Windowsills. The specific geometry of a Haussmann corner. The font on a pharmacy sign.
Two Themes That Emerged
Looking at the full set afterward, two themes appeared without me having planned them:
“Petit Paris” — the small things. Details at ground level. Cigarette ash on a marble café table. The specific green of a park chair worn by decades of weather. A child’s shoe at the bottom of a staircase.
“Paris burned gold” — the light. I became obsessed with the particular quality of late afternoon light on limestone facades. There’s a color temperature Paris achieves between 4 and 7pm that I’ve never found anywhere else in the same way.
The Montmartre Stairs
I navigated them every morning carrying the camera bag, and they became their own photograph every time — different light, different people, different degree of morning quiet. I must have photographed them forty times across two months and I don’t regret a single frame.
On shooting in Paris: The best photographs from this city almost never come from where you planned to be. They come from where you’re walking past on the way somewhere else. Slow down. Carry the camera at chest level. Look at everything twice.
This series was photographed during spring 2025 — a personal project about observation and the relationship between a photographer and a city that has been photographed so many times it should feel exhausted and somehow never does.
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