And Then, Suddenly, It Was Paris

 And Then, Suddenly, It Was Paris

The drive from Charles de Gaulle Airport had already given me quite an introduction.

We had passed harvested fields that could have been Pennsylvania, tangled roadside vegetation, graffiti-covered walls, highways, office towers and construction cranes. It was interesting—but it wasn’t yet the Paris most of us carry around in our imaginations.

Then, almost imperceptibly, things began to change.

The highway disappeared. The buildings moved closer together. The streets narrowed. People appeared on the sidewalks.

And suddenly I thought:

Ah. There you are, Paris.

The transition begins with trees

My first glimpse wasn’t a monument at all.

It was green.

A substantial iron fence ran alongside the street, and behind it was a surprisingly dense wall of mature trees. In front were bicycle racks, a rental bike and one of those wonderfully ordinary Paris streetlights.

It was a quiet transition from the sprawling highway landscape we’d just left behind.

There was something reassuring about it. The city wasn’t announcing itself with trumpets. It was simply beginning to reveal itself.

A street that finally feels like Paris

Then I looked down this street.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

The road slopes gently between residential buildings, with mature trees forming a great green wall along one side. There are stone walls, balconies, chimneys, shutters, narrow sidewalks and that wonderful accumulation of architectural details that tells you you’re in an older European city.

And look at the pavement.

Cobblestones interrupt the asphalt at the intersection. A large bicycle symbol is painted directly onto the street. Pedestrian crossings, bike lanes and automobile traffic all have to negotiate the same relatively small space.

This isn’t a grand Parisian boulevard.

It’s simply a neighborhood street.

And that may be exactly why I like it.

Okay. NOW we’re in Paris.

Then came the café.

There it was: a corner restaurant with its dark green awning, little round tables and those unmistakable woven café chairs lined up along the sidewalk.

Above it are tall windows, pale shutters, curved balconies and black iron railings.

People are standing on the sidewalk. A woman checks her phone. A child sits in a stroller. The pedestrian signal glows red.

Nothing has been arranged for a photograph.

It’s just an ordinary moment.

And yet this is precisely the sort of scene that makes you think:

Paris.

Not because it’s famous.

Because it’s familiar.

Paris really does belong to bicycles

I had already noticed bicycle markings on the streets, but then I began seeing bicycles everywhere.

Here they are lined up against a strikingly modern building—traditional bicycles, cargo-style bikes, electric bikes and scooters all jumbled together.

That juxtaposition interested me.

When we imagine Paris architecture, we tend to picture limestone façades and wrought-iron balconies. But Paris is also a modern city, and buildings like this coexist with the 19th-century architecture only blocks away.

The bicycles connect the two worlds.

They aren’t decorative props.

They’re transportation.

Paris is under construction, too

Remember all those cranes I photographed on the way into the city?

They didn’t stop at the city limits.

Here, an older building has been stripped back dramatically. Portions of the façade remain, but behind them are exposed structural elements, scaffolding and the unmistakable red vertical structure of construction equipment.

Two pedestrians walk casually past.

And that contrast fascinated me.

For them, this is Monday.

For me, it is another reminder that Paris isn’t a museum.

People sometimes talk about preserving Paris as though the entire city has simply remained unchanged for 150 years.

It hasn’t.

Buildings are renovated. Interiors disappear. Structures are adapted. Neighborhoods evolve.

Paris survives partly because Paris keeps changing.

Not everything in Paris is picturesque

And then there are scenes like this.

Flattened cardboard. Wooden pallets. Plastic-wrapped recycling. A worker handling the remains of deliveries or collections beside an apartment building.

It would be very easy not to take this photograph.

But why?

Every beautiful café receives deliveries. Every elegant apartment produces garbage. Every restaurant has cardboard boxes. Every city has an infrastructure that makes daily life possible.

This is Paris, too.

I actually enjoy photographing these ordinary pieces of city life because years later they can tell me more about what a place felt like than another photograph of a famous monument.

The neighborhood shops appear

A little farther along was Déco Bazar.

Now the sidewalk is busy with merchandise racks, pedestrians, signs and a work vehicle carrying ladders on its roof.

This is not luxury-shopping Paris.

This is I need something for the apartment Paris.

The shop appears packed with all sorts of practical things, spilling visually toward the sidewalk. Next door, a medical-imaging sign advertises scanner and MRI services.

That combination makes me smile.

Tourists may come to Paris for Dior and Chanel.

Parisians still need an MRI and something from the bazaar.

The Paris I love begins to appear

And then the streets became increasingly beautiful.

This corner has so many of the elements I associate with residential Paris: pale stone façades, tall narrow buildings, iron balconies, mature trees, bicycles locked to railings and small businesses occupying the ground floors.

But notice something else.

The street is not pristine.

There are trash bags near the corner. Cars are parked along the curb. Signs compete for attention. Pedestrians are going about their day.

That’s important.

Because the Paris I love photographing isn’t perfect Paris.

It’s lived-in Paris.

Then, through the trees, came this beautiful stone church.

After the modern buildings and construction sites, suddenly there were rounded apses, tall arched windows, decorative stonework and iron fencing.

This is what makes moving through Paris so visually interesting.

You don’t experience the city chronologically.

A modern building can stand a few blocks from a 19th-century apartment house, which sits near a much older church, while electric bicycles and delivery scooters move past all of them.

Centuries coexist on the same street.

And finally, the unmistakable Paris façade

By this point, there was no longer any question about where I was.

Look at those façades.

Tall French windows.

Cream-colored stone.

Elaborate black wrought-iron railings.

Decorative moldings.

Wooden double doors.

Shutters.

And enormous plane trees rising from the sidewalks.

Then, right in the middle of all that architectural elegance, there are five bright green garbage bins.

I love them.

They ruin the postcard.

And they make the photograph real.

There is even a glowing green pharmacy cross tucked into the scene—another little symbol you begin to recognize almost immediately when traveling through France.

And then there are the scooters

This photograph captures another detail that became impossible to miss once I was actually in Paris: scooters and motorcycles are everywhere.

Here they are lined up almost wheel-to-wheel beneath the windows of the neighborhood buildings, with a delivery truck sharing the street and restaurants and small businesses tucked into the ground floors.

I love how much everyday Paris is contained in this one frame. There is a Japanese restaurant, another restaurant next door, a locksmith and security shop, a hotel sign, pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and a delivery in progress—all beneath those wonderfully restrained cream-colored façades with their rows of identical windows and little iron railings.

And then there is that enormous plane tree in the foreground, planted in its tiny circle of earth as though the street simply grew around it.

This is the Paris that becomes visible when you stop looking for monuments.

People have places to go, meals to serve, packages to deliver, locks to repair and scooters to park.

The architecture may tell me I’m in Paris.

But scenes like this tell me that Paris is a neighborhood.

This was the Paris I was waiting for

The transformation from Charles de Gaulle Airport into central Paris wasn’t dramatic.

There wasn’t a moment when someone announced:

“You are now entering Paris.”

Instead, I watched it happen through the window.

Fields became highways.

Highways became suburbs.

Suburbs became construction sites.

Construction sites became apartment blocks.

The streets narrowed.

The trees grew larger.

Bicycles multiplied.

Cafés appeared.

The limestone façades began lining up shoulder to shoulder.

And suddenly, there it was.

Paris.

Not the Paris of a tourism advertisement.

Not yet the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or Notre-Dame.

This was something I think I appreciated even more:

the Paris where people actually live.

People were walking to work, pushing children in strollers, riding bicycles, making deliveries, renovating buildings, putting out recycling, opening cafés and doing all of the wonderfully mundane things that happen in a city every single day.

I came to Paris expecting to photograph its beauty.

But before I had even reached my hotel, Paris had already reminded me of something important:

Sometimes the most interesting travel photographs begin before you reach the place you thought you came to photograph.