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Paris — Streets and the Seine, 2017

A wandering Paris day across districts — Jean Nouvel's Philharmonie at La Villette, the Musée d'Orsay's iron-and-glass clock window and the Seine beyond it, Haussmann boulevards and shop windows, a Métro platform, ending at the airport on the way home. Tjeerd appears in two of the frames — 2017, the year the photography started in earnest.

The Philharmonie de Paris wears its ambition on the outside. Jean Nouvel's parametric aluminium cladding tiles every surface in a shifting mosaic of dark and silver panels, while a chrome-scaled tongue of reflective metal erupts between two cantilevered planes — a sculptural gesture at concert-hall scale. One person stands at the base, dwarfed. The sky above Parc de la Villette is clear autumn blue, indifferent to the spectacle beneath it. The facade reads as both surface and structure: ornament that is also load-bearing argument.
A narrow garden path in Paris, lined with dense hedgerows and late-season planting, draws a lone photographer to a stop. Autumn has started its work — leaves turning at the edges, yellow flowers holding on at the right-hand border, the sky flat and pale above the canopy. The scene is unhurried: one person, one frame, a quiet park corridor that most visitors walk straight through.
A photographer frames a shot through his smartphone, positioned against one of the ornate iron-framed windows inside the Musée d'Orsay. Through the decorative ironwork to his left, the museum's grand vaulted ceiling and gilded stone ornamentation are visible — the subject he's hunting is already there, layered in the frame he hasn't taken yet. The window behind him diffuses the Paris daylight into something flat and even, while the riveted green ironwork does the opposite: dense geometry, every panel deliberate.
A young man with a backpack stands among green hedgerows on a Paris boulevard, the cream limestone facades and slate mansard roofs of a classic Haussmann building rising behind him. The overcast sky flattens the light evenly across the scene, pulling the warm stone of the architecture and the deep greens of the street trees into the same quiet palette. Paris offers backdrops that do the work without asking — the city's built fabric is the frame, and the person inside it is the point.
A Paris shop window filled with globes — a dozen or more, suspended on thin rods at varying heights, each one lit or catching daylight differently. Some glow warm amber from internal illumination; others hold the cooler blues and greens of ocean and landmass in flat daylight. The glass doubles the street behind: passersby, storefronts, cobblestones reflected across the same surface that holds the world in miniature. Cartography as decoration, geography as window dressing — the globes carry the weight of every continent and reduce it to something you could hold in one hand.
A river barge pushes upstream past the Musée d'Orsay, the Seine stretching ahead in a long corridor of receding bridges and autumn-tinged embankment trees. The Rive Gauche holds the left frame — Haussmann stone and arched windows running the full length of the bank. The sky does as much work as the water: cumulus clouds stacked deep over the Paris cityscape, lit from the side, pulling the eye toward the distant rooftops. A working river and a monumental city, both going about their business at the same moment.
Heavy traffic backs up along a Paris boulevard, cars queued past a construction hoarding plastered with archival images. Behind the standstill, a classic Haussmann-era building rounds a corner under a wide autumn sky — the kind of blue that shows up only between cloud fronts. Urban congestion is the subject here; the architecture manages to hold its ground anyway, composed and unhurried above the gridlock.
Pont de la Concorde at a standstill, the Obelisk of Luxor rising above the queue in the middle distance. Heavy cloud rolls over Place de la Concorde, breaking just enough to let blue through — the sky doing more visual work than the traffic below. Paris street photography at its most ordinary, which is to say it holds its own ground without trying.
The iron gate bars of the Quai d'Orsay push themselves into the foreground, slicing the neoclassical facade of the Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères into vertical strips. The building holds its grandeur behind the security railings — columns, arched windows, a French tricolor against a clouded sky — and the gate turns that grandeur into something that has to be earned by looking. Confinement and ceremony, pressed into the same frame.
Cumulus clouds stack deep over the Esplanade des Invalides, dominating a Paris skyline that holds its ground just enough. The Grand Palais dome and the gilded column of Pont Alexandre III anchor the horizon — present, but not competing. The sky is the subject; the architecture is the frame that gives it scale. Classic Haussmann lamp posts and an autumn-green lawn keep the foreground grounded while everything above it moves.
A Paris RER station caught between the city and the railway — the platform canopy cuts a hard diagonal across the frame while catenary wires fan outward overhead. Overcast light flattens the shadows and strips the scene back to its geometry: parallel tracks, converging rooflines, a Haussmann-era building rising behind the trees. The platform does what platforms do — it holds people in suspension, briefly, between one place and the next.
A wide Parisian boulevard stretches into the distance under a deep blue summer sky, its pavements lined with mature plane trees. Pedestrians move along the left-hand footpath past a Domino's billboard and a row of commercial signage; the broad carriageway is near-empty, giving the street an unusual sense of space. The trees do the heavy lifting here — their full green canopies hold the frame together where the architecture on its own would not.
A Haussmann-era residential block anchors the left edge of the frame, its ochre facade stacked with balconies and shuttered windows in the afternoon sun. The boulevard recedes to the right, lamp posts arcing into open air, mature plane trees lining the carriageway. Deep blue sky and a cumulus cloud mass fill the upper two-thirds — the architecture holds the ground while the sky takes the rest. Paris at its most structurally legible.
A paperback Stephen King novel sits on a concrete jersey barrier at the edge of the Charles de Gaulle apron, a roller suitcase propped beside it. Behind the barrier, orange traffic cones line a taxiway where a ground crew vehicle rolls under a dramatic, cloud-stacked sky. A French Blue aircraft sits at a distant gate. The stillness of the reading material against the controlled motion of the tarmac is the whole contrast — one world paused, another permanently in motion.
Paris airport apron, mid-day. The sun sits high and hard behind a bank of cumulus, burning a halo through the cloud mass while the rest of the sky holds a deep, saturated blue. Boarding stairs and a ground crew vehicle anchor the foreground in the ordinary machinery of departure — the sky turns it into something else entirely. Functional infrastructure, elemental atmosphere; both fully present in the same frame.