Paris 1989

Cataloging

I’ve been systematically going through my archives of images so as to put them in some kind of order. There are very early digital images; RAW .jpg and early .mix files. as well as photos, slides and polaroids. In addition some VHS tapes and mini DV tapes in HDV. It’s an effort to colate all this and back it up but I’m doing it as time permits. My material goes back to the early 60s.

Then I came upon this – so I scanned it.

Paris

It seems that I was in Paris on Tuesday the 26th September 1989 and on my way to the Gare du Nord to leave for Amiens and Villiers-Bretonneaux and thence London via Calais. I’d been shooting colour transparencies up until this roll. I’d had the pleasure of going to the screening of an original print of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 classic La Belle et la Bete. The theatre light had seemed charged with the nascent shimmer of the silver halides off the print; an indelible memory.

I remember taking the shot – at around 7.00am in morning fog – directly into the early morning sun. I didn’t waste a second shot, but waited for the barge to come into frame and clicked off just the one; I knew I had a shot, these days we’d shot twenty and they’d all be so-so. I only shot one roll of twenty-four monochrome negatives and I know there a few other gems on it.