My first "memories" of Paris came from a book.
As a little boy, I knew I had a father in a distant place called “Paris” in an equally distant place called “France”. From time to time, my younger brother and I would get postcards written in a shaky hand, signed with three X’s which our mother assured us were kisses. Paris itself was a blank. I had been there, but as a very small child, leaving me no memory at all of the city.
When I turned six, my father sent me a book of photographs:
Paris des rêves, by Izis.
For me, it was perfectly named: “Paris of Dreams”. So it would long prove for a little boy with no other image of his father’s world. The subjects were largely simple: a man fishing by the Seine, a cat in a window, a little boy standing in front of graffiti. The city looked gray to me, full of old stone and dark water, grizzled old men… Even the flower seller, with her parasol and flowers, was in shades of gray. A few of the pictures showed the rain that so often hovers over the city, more sprinkling than soaking it.
I was too young then to appreciate one of the more wonderful features of the book, except for its visual beauty: the handwritten meditations, mainly by well-known writers, facing each image. The writers included Henry Miller, Paul Eluard and Jean Cocteau. My own handwriting has always been awful and so even today I take great delight in the sheer beauty of all these hands, aside from the often poetic texts.
But above all this book gave me my first image of Paris, an image complemented, but not contradicted, by actual experience and one that has remained with me after years of knowing the actual city. My first Paris, the Paris forever imprinted in my mind, was that of Izis, in black and white; or in my memory, of black and gray.
