Paris numérique

Paris numérique -Digital images of Paris from 2012 up to ....

Street digital photography Paris

“… You might think you know Paris, but there is no such thing; there are corners, streets, that you could explore the whole day, and even more so at night. It is a fascinating city; and while it is not the only one… Paris is like a heart that beats all the time; it is not merely the place where I live. I’m connected to this place and there is a sort of osmosis from it, a biological living contact. Paris is a woman; and is a little like the woman of my life…”
Julio Cortázar

Street digital photography Paris

And so the day came when I returned to Paris with a camera. Photography however, had entered decisively into the digital era. It was hard to accept that I would no longer experience the thrill and anticipation of waiting a few hours for that magic moment when, in  Chatêlet or in Champs Elysée, the film lab would hand me my developed negatives.

The digital revolution has brought in a new era and dynamic to our lives, and our perspective on the world with digital photography is consequently very different from the days of analog.

I had lived in and made film photos of a Paris from a by-gone time. I feared upon my return I would find a different, diminished, City of Light than the fascinating city Cortázar had so loved before. But once there, old places and buried memories came flooding back to me, and I saw that beautiful and spontaneous images of Paris were still to be had if one looked. The old analog and the new digital city came together in a new perspective of Paris for me. A Paris whose heart was still beating…

Little by little and with different eyes,  I am assimilating this new way of seeing the world, a modern world that like digital photography has become “immediate”.  

The axis of this world remains the same however. There are beating “hearts” all around us, hearts we can unite with and that guide us through this vast universe, which is nothing more than a  “tangled ball of yarn”  with its  “infinite material all wrapped up around itself”, and that curious eyes can unravel and decipher.

” In the midst of this precarious happiness, this false truce, I held out my hand and touched the tangled ball of yarn that is Paris, its infinite material all wrapped up around itself, the precipitate of its atmosphere falling on its windows and forming images of clouds and garrets.” Julio Cortázar

Warsaw, Poland , November 2017 © Pablo Munini

Street digital photography Paris