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Category / Forget Paris

Paris Then & Now: A City on the Edge of Freedom

Being able to walk around Paris with window vision into the past is probably up there with my top three wishes. A Parisian photographer and art director, Julien Knez, made it a reality with his remarkable before & after overlays. Tracking down the exact location of vintage photographs taken in the 1940s, Knez gives us a glimpse into Paris on…

Living the Bohemian Student Dream in 1960s Paris

I love to find a good Paris photo story that I haven’t seen before, and this one that I found buried in the LIFE archives is a quite the treat. Veteran photographer for the magazine Loomis Dean followed a group of young students in 1961, getting an intimate peek into their lives as they pursued the…

The Remains of a Paris ‘Kowloon’ Walled City

You may recall we once discovered Kowloon City, the Hong Kong ‘historical accident’, an urban enclave so densely populated by squatters that even the law lost its grip on the seven-acre plot crammed with 300 interconnected towers. It turns out we had one just like it right here in Paris. And unlike Kowloon, which was…

That time the Paris Metro was Segregated by a Class System

Today I pulled up an old New York Times article reporting the news that Paris’ subway system had eliminated its First and Second class carriage system. But the newspaper article wasn’t from 1950-something, it was from 1991. Image (c) Flickr, Alexandre C Forgive me, but for someone living in a country whose national motto is “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”, and…

Monsieur Hulot’s Parisian House

There are some things that just make me tick. I can’t exactly explain why; what first catches my eye, but it seems we have quite a few of these things in common, you and I. I’d like to share with you this very short and simple clip from a 1950s French film that for some reason…

Beat Boxing in a Condemned Paris Train Station

Where the smoke rises into the Paris night by the old sleeping railway tracks and crumbling walls blanketed in graffiti, the sound of music pumps from beneath us, luring our ears underground… Let’s slip behind the fence (the flimsy string is just begging to be untied). In a shivery and dark old storage facility, strange things await… Mysterious…

Reviving the Studio 54 of Paris: Fame & Debauchery in a Bathhouse turned Nightclub

Before it became an icon of Parisian nightlife, it was Marcel Proust’s favourite bath house a century earlier. In 1978, it became Paris’ answer to Studio 54, overflowing with famous faces; a cultural institution fuelled by sex, drugs, disco … and midnight swimming. Photographs (c) Foc Kan “Magnifique, Magique, Mythique”, writes one former patron describing…

The Floating Paris Winery

Between the 19th and 20th century, wine barrels would travel via canal boat from the regions of Burgundy all the way to Paris which were then traded at the riverside cellars of Bercy, destined to grace the tables of thirsty Parisians. Today, there is one little houseboat, known as ‘La Cave Vagabonde‘, still making the…

The Paris Shop of a Million Lost Photographs

On the outer corners of the red light district in Paris’ Pigalle, an unassuming old shop space caught my attention. The roller shutter was almost fully closed, but I could see in the window there were stack upon stacks of photographs, old ones, collectively piled on the floor. I then signalled to the young man…

The Great Parisian Waiters Race

If ever you’ve had an unpleasant experience with a French waiter (I’m guessing that’ll be just about everyone reading this), perhaps you might not be averse to some light entertainment at their expense. A bizarre sporting event that dates back more than a hundred years, the Waiters Race, better known to the French as the…

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