Bel Été

Photos by Me | Texture and Tutorial from Blah, Blah, Blagh

"Ahhh Paris…City of Romance, City of Lights. It is well known that at heart Paris is a Woman; matriarch, mistress, muse, slave and master to French decadence. In the dark of her narrow laneways, she whispers soft secrets; down Grand boulevards she trumpets her magnificence. She who has enamoured the greatest lives of art into a single spiralling and volatile core; she who has driven men to madness, women to suicide and the chaste to sin. Entwined around every limb, the fluter of her heartbeat in every ear, to her faithful she grants the soaring heights of perfection and the basest pits of degredation, without them ever telling the two apart. By hand, by heart, by mind she leads her frenzied dancers toward a precipice that all see coming but few ever rear from.

And she survives every mortal implosion.

You can hear Paris sigh when a lover does not return to her, but that single breath is the only memorial they will recieve, for her heart does not remember. Paris is ever chaste though her stones drip with the debauches of history. With all the hauteur of the Arc de Triomphe, from behind the coquettish promise of the Moulin Rouge and from the loftiness of her Eiffel Tower she looks down on her low town – narcissist and voyeur – safe from compromise."

- Grant Mills

The author of this piece captures beautifully with words what I hope to do with pictures. Of course, I cannot convey these sentiments as precisely as is acheived here but with each visit to Paris I notice something I haven't seen before, or learn something I didn't know. From the snow covered canals in January to the blossoming boulevards of April and now the sunny sidewalks of August, I have watched the scenery change with the seasons.

I wanted to share this because it is the work of someone very talented, someone who has notebooks of work littering the floor of his room. People cannot appreciate it when it is kept so secretly and I would like to see more made available for my own enjoyment at least! Posting my photos and getting feedback has been fantastic for my development as a photographer, and I hope this might encourage the writer to do the same.

So, with his permission of course, I have paired it with some artwork I hope does it justice. May it deliver some idea of this magical city I am fortunate to watch unfold over the year.

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