Doing street photography in Paris for a whole day without getting any satisfactory results can be quite frustrating.
Until the moment when a little inspiration leads to a photo that can make sense (I’ll give you the key to understanding at the end of the article).
30 minutes of photos in the metro, presented in chronological order in this 3rd part of our “Street photography in Paris” series.
The first metro
On that late April day in 2024, I was particularly upset that I hadn’t produced anything memorable: no images around which I could tell a story.
As I boarded the metro to my makeshift Parisian Airbnb, I knew full well that my frustration was likely to spoil part of the evening.
A vision of the couple
As I got on my metro train, a young couple with a splendid bouquet of flowers immediately made me want to do one last line of shooting.
I took out my smartphone to blend in.
If only a few flowers had fanned my photographic flame,
I was quickly rewarded by this scene of purely feminine abandonment in the arms of a man going about his business…
A theme sometimes depicted in painting (all comparisons aside), for example in Louis-Marie Baader’s “Napoleon’s Farewell to Josephine ”.
Blurred ideas
I took advantage of being at the head of an automated line 1 train at Bastille, to revolutionize… my Iphone flou-tographic practice.
A rail trip in a hurry.
Sticking to the glass to travel into another dimension.
Refocusing on the human condition.
Re-engineer your senses by playing with the text on a poster in the background and the male bust that’s “wowing” fewer and fewer girls?
Pas le temps de régler la mire, comme pour « la pêche aux filles » puisque le métro suivant arrivait déjà.
No time to adjust the sights, as with “fishing for girls in Paris”, as the next metro was already arriving.
The last metro
In colors
A few minutes before the end of my photographic day, I made two successive images of the same scene.
The tight framing illustrating this article was my first intention and had a meaning for me (cf. epilogue), but I couldn’t resist freezing the whole scene with this passenger who blended in perfectly with the pop art colors.
The purple lips, matching the bench seat and pink pants in the background, were matched by three patches of yellow amidst a cameo of beige and brown, with reds in the background.
As for the dress pattern, it subliminally completed this colorful harmony.
Offbeat views
As close to introspection as you can get.
Headshots.
Escape from the metro
Here and elsewhere.
A desire for freedom.
A thirst for fresh air.
The story behind the image
A few years ago, on an organized trip through Los Angeles, I decided to skip the bus tour of the city, much to the dismay of our guide, whose eyes widened when I told him I was going to make do with public transport.
In the megalopolis of the car, public transport such as the metro and buses are mostly used by the poorer sections of society.
So I found myself almost the only white person in the middle of Latinos and African-Americans, discovering for the first time on my cellophane trip the segregation that is rampant in the United States.
In the Paris metro, this is of course less visible, as the density of housing means that many different social strata take the metro.
But seeing this perhaps not-so-innocent advertising image brought back memories of my Hollywood bus and subway escapade.
The racist analogy between black people and bananas, between a packed van and the often crowded subway, gave a special meaning to one of my images, for the first time that day.
Photographs and texts: Thierry Allard, all rights reserved.
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