This project is a photographic essay about street life in Paris. I began recording what I saw with my camera in 2004 when I moved to this beautifully diverse and culturally rich city. I had just finished a 6-month long Erasmus program in photojournalism at the Danish School of Journalism and then came to Paris to work as an intern in the VII Photo Agency Paris office. My goal at the time was to begin working as a freelance photojournalist for both French and international publications. Like most young photographers I was quite naïve and soon found out that it was almost an impossible task to get work right away at a large magazine like Le Monde. Smaller newspapers were going out of business everywhere and the overall outlook of print media was becoming more and more dismal. Working at VII gave me wonderful insight into the dynamics of a photo agency and the kinds of photo stories that magazines were publishing. In fact it was this experience that nudged me away from the world of editorial photography to something more lyrical and perhaps more poetic.

Roaming the streets of Paris on foot was, and still is an exciting way to discover the many hidden and often surprising intricacies that make up this city. I’ve come to understand Paris as a semi-organized, yet often chaotic place. One’s eye is immediately drawn to the magnificent architecture, the Seine that meanders around the Ile St. Louis, or perhaps just a cute couple enjoying a ‘noisette’ at a typical Parisian café. We all have these cliché images of Paris in our minds, often in black and white thanks to the abundance of Doisneau postcards sold by local vendors. After a bit more inspection I’ve discovered another Paris marked by an edgy play of color and a peculiar connection between people, places and things. Yes, Paris is the capital of fashion and glamour, but it is also a place where social ills can hit you in the face. Sometimes it is these two things happening separately, and sometimes they blend together in the same image.

One example is a photo that I took at night of the Eiffel Tower. It is lit up with blue lights and the 12 stars symbolizing the number of EU member states in 2008. France held the EU presidency that year. An illegal Senegalese immigrant in the foreground, selling small illuminating Eiffel Tower trinkets juxtaposes this historic symbol. It may be inferred that a supposedly strong political and economic community is in contrast with a West African country facing many hardships and corruption. I spoke to one Senegalese man by the entrance to the Chateau of Versailles and he told me that he comes to France during the busy summer tourist season and returns home in the Fall. As a side caveat to this example, just two weeks ago French police raided a suburban warehouse near Paris and discovered 300 tons of illegal tourist souvenirs including these mini Eiffel Towers that had been imported from China.

Finally, my aim as a photographer is not to change reality, but rather to play with it, in ways that are not always obvious to the casual observer. The writer James Agee wrote, “In the kind of photography we are talking about here, the actual is not at all transformed; it is reflected and recorded, within the limits of the camera, with all possible accuracy. The artist’s task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization.”  Most of my photos arise out of instinct and luck as opposed to a pre-established thought process or intellect. The challenge and fun of taking street photos is exploring on foot and hoping that special moments and juxtapositions will come my way. Perhaps in a way it is an obsessive and endless hunt for spontaneous visual beauty.