18 November 2025
Dear Crina,
It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. We’ve been busy with other adventures in looking, haven’t we? The winter seems to have finally arrived and temperatures are plummeting. There were rumours of snow this week.
As you know, I’ve just returned from Paris; a short trip with my daughter. She’s had a tough time recently, although I didn’t know the full extent of it when I booked the Eurostar. The excursion came at just the right time. A distraction, of sorts. My plan was to see as much of Paris Photo as possible and spend a few days with her. One of the advantages of being semi-retired is that I have a good chunk of time between work days to do as I please.
I’ve been to Paris Photo twice before, both times with my friend Chris and his students. The first, in 2015, was dramatic. The year of the Bataclan massacre. We didn’t get to see any photos so resorted to making an exhibition of our own in the students’ hotel rooms and staring helplessly at the Montmartre skyline from the roof terrace. A preparation for COVID-19 Lockdown, in retrospect.
The second visit, in November 2018, was a much happier affair and included briefly standing next to Agnes Varda and a brush with the great Joel Meyerowitz.
I spotted a few photo celebs this time around: Justine Kurland, Paul Graham and Harry Gruyaert, for example. The event in the Grand Palais is, frankly, bonkers. The huge space is heaving with people and plastered with photographs. I made the mistake of visiting after lunch and could barely move. It was unusually warm in Paris and I was overdressed. After about an hour, I felt drained. I’m really glad I saw the shows at MEP and Le Bal, and both photobook events were interesting, particularly Polycopies. I’m thinking of trying to organise a trip for my A-level photographers next year but fear it might be just too expensive.
The atmosphere in Paris felt quite strange. I didn’t see any obvious references to the 2015 attacks, although I understand that there was a memorial event at the Bataclan. I wanted to see as much photography as I could in the time available but didn’t want to force my daughter to schlepp about unnecessarily. She likes making photos but doesn’t have a professional commitment to it. I struggled to get a handle on it all. I neither dedicated myself to viewing photographs nor making them. I was, as they say, entre le marteau et l’enclume.
Our AirBnB apartment was fantastic, filled with intriguing objets d’art and books, an Aladdin’s Cave.1 It felt very much like a poet’s lair, crammed with mementos, latent connections and crepuscular light. Inside, one could be forgiven for feeling momentarily exiled from the city, caught in a waking dream.
My favourite experience of the trip was visiting the Théâtre du Châtelet to see the Martha Graham Dance Company perform four works. It was mesmerising. My daughter is a dancer and was able to explain to me some of the technical aspects. What struck me most was the incredible discipline, agility and strength of the dancers’ bodies, the combination of power and poise and their amazing presence on stage. Graham’s choreography is demanding. Dancers have to exercise maximum control of their gestures. It is strict, like ballet, but also incorporates unconventional, abstract forms. Some pieces are without narrative. Tensions must be resolved.
When the kids were little, we stayed in an apartment near Bastille. I remembered that there was a nearby food and flea market, so we spent one morning there. Lots of the stalls were selling old photographs, displayed in unruly heaps. I spent a few Euros on images that attracted me for various reasons. They all seemed to be culled from family albums, discarded remnants of other lives.
What draws us to some images and not others? Each of these was strange and mysterious to me for different reasons. A damaged corner, a curious gesture, the play of light, a gaze. I’m glad I rescued them from complete obscurity.
To be honest, I found it difficult to make my own photographs. I was either rushing from one venue to another, packing in as many cultural treasures as I could muster, or concentrating on being with my daughter. I did make a few images, some of which are shared below. If only I had taken my time, like Georges Perec, to sit at a café table for a couple of hours (three days would have been silly) and simply watch the world go by.2
How do you photograph a city like Paris? Again, why are we drawn to some scenes and not others? Clichés abound and there’s always the nagging doubt that the picture you are making is superficial, a pointless fragment of a larger whole that resists your connaissance. I tried to remember the advice I give my students. There’s a time for making and a time for critique.
Reviewing these images, I notice a strange kind of in-betweenness, a slight frustration. Barriers, screens and blockages. The words “liminal” and “interstitial” are a little over-used in photography discourse, but might also be appropriate to describe these spaces. I’m not sure how effective photographs can really be in conjuring a mood or suggesting a state of mind, but it may be that these pictures, taken together, convey something of my failure to make sense of the trip and to the complexities of family relations. I’m afraid I may have disappointed E. M Forster’s Margaret.3
In a vain attempt to emulate Boris Mikhailov’s sandwiches, I combined a few of the flea market photo finds with my own pictures in Photoshop.4 They are only mildly diverting, but they at least complicate the business of looking. A connection of sorts.
Paris, for me at least, remains an enigma; a heady concoction of disconnected places, spaces and experiences. Perhaps that’s why I find it so fascinating and keep going back.
Your photography friend,
Jon
This letter is one of a sequence entitled Experiența Spațiului. Here are links to the others:
Experiența Spațiului - Fuzzy Borders - by Jon Nicholls
Experiența Spațiului - Cadaques - by Crina Prida
Experiența Spațiului - Formidable Encounters - by Jon Nicholls
Experiența Spațiului - Londra - by Crina Prida
Experiența Spațiului - One and one is four - by Jon Nicholls
Experiența Spațiului - More than a quantum of solace - by Jon Nicholls
These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit by contributing to the film fund. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.
I’ve only just discovered that the tale of Aladdin was a later addition to the Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland. A French connection.
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”
―E.M. Forster, Howards End
These and other magnificent Mikhailov pictures are currently on display at The Photographers’ Gallery.
Jon, what a beautiful and unexpected (well, unannounced) letter! I am struggling on my side to put together a short version - maybe an ebauche of what I saw and noted in Portugal. The more you grow attached to a place, the more complicated it becomes to describe it. You nailed one of the reasons - "Clichés abound and there’s always the nagging doubt that the picture you are making is superficial, a pointless fragment of a larger whole that resists your connaissance". I have to add the brutal fact that we are subjective in thinking/describing/remembering. Thank you for giving me the most needed extra-nudge. Also - how cool it is I have my own photographed memory of Meyerowitz, from earlier this year in London.
P.S. I a mesmerized by lost old photos. You did a great job pairing some with your own.
Excellent stuff, Jon. I too love to dig for the old photos out there in the wild. Looks like you got some good ones.