The Code Maker of Maison Blanche
Paris Ancient to Modern
Except the Brassai immediately below, all photos in this essay © James Graham
The unseen is everywhere, watching us and commenting. Persons and objects ignored as we walk by, faster always faster, the sum total of everything we miss on our chosen routes.
City walls are the unexpected revelation of life, freely given, demanding our attention – silently. The expressive in a clamped-down world of hurries and worries. A floating world in which humans are measured by the quality of their gestures, not their efficiency.
Students from the nearby business school still have time to kill. They aren’t ready for the Firm just yet.
Here the student of lips, another of eyes, the cartoonist, the portraitist, flowers and a reiterated running figure, the lower panel fuller of brute obsessives. One imagines an archaeologist publishing an essay on his find two thousand years hence.
And what about those lines scrawled on the lower right ? They’re hard to make out now, a year later…
More rain on the deserted hills
Evening air overflowing with freshness
Pine branches open to the moonlight. Riverbanks lined with bamboo
The wagtails have flown back
The perfume of spring lingers everywhere
Don’t fall behind – you go first, noble friend.
Ancient or modern, classic or made up on the spot ? Poems should make you lean forward to hear what they’re saying.
*
I walked into Paris. I never took the plane, I hitched up from the south, rode with the truckers from Lyon and across Champagne in the spring to arrive in Paris in time for my birthday. Nicely fêted, I was given a small camera by a lady before she took off for Spain. I started taking photos of the walls, and haven’t stopped since. It’s an addiction.
I’m a smoker. We’re known for leaning against walls, letting the world go by. A few stray thoughts if we’re lucky. Just about anywhere will do. If you move slowly enough, a whole other city reveals itself.
I became a bit of a fanatic. The most unassuming grafitti, the hardest to see, became the ones I wanted to encounter. You don’t look for them, they find you. Stencils and logos and tags grab your attention, as they are meant to. The others find you by surprise, in moments between. There’s a war on now against humanity’s solitudes, those quickly passing instants when we ponder and doubt.
Paris 2011-13 was the end of an epoch. I didn’t know that at the time, nobody did.