Pyramid of Cannons on Place de la Concorde in Paris, 1919

Pyramid of captured German cannons on Place de la Concorde in Paris on the eve of the Victory Parade on July 14, 1919.

British cavalry in the procession of the Victory celebrations in Paris, 14 July 1919. This celebration was held on the day the French celebrate Bastille Day, an annual event held on the Champs Elysee in Paris to commemorate the spiritual beginnings of the French Republic.

The Paris Morgue Was One of the Most Popular Tourist Attractions in Paris in the 19th Century

Today, Parisians and tourists from around the world flock to visit the dozens of magnificent monuments and museums housed by the capital, in search of the legend of the Eiffel Tower, the richness of the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, or the art of living of covered passages. But there are more than a century, it was a different kind of tour that attracted thousands of tourists: the Morgue of Paris.

The Paris Morgue was built in 1864 on the Île de la Cité, one of the two islands in the Seine, just behind the Notre Dame de Paris, where the bodies of unidentified dead–most of them suicide cases–were displayed on marble slabs for friends or family to identify.

When arriving at the morgue, the bodies were first stripped, inspected, frozen and then wheeled out on black marble slabs for public display. As the morgue was not refrigerated until 1882, cold water would drip from the ceiling constantly, giving the skin of the dead a bloated and puffy appearance. Up to 50 visitors at a time would crowd around great windows overlooking the slabs, to gawk and gossip over the bodies. The dead would usually have to be removed after three days due to decomposition, at which point a photograph or a wax cast would take their place.

The spectacle continued beyond the walls of the morgue. Parisian newspapers often speculated on the identities of the dead; every guide book directed visitors to the morgue; and some of the bodies became famous, drawing up to 40,000 people in a day. Deceased young women lying naked on dissection tables became a common theme on canvas and the police would even stage public ‘confrontations’ between a suspected murderer and a corpse, drawing much of the intrigue that reality programs do today.

The morgue was finally closed to the public in March 1907 over moral concerns, drawing complaints from local businesses, street vendors and journalists.

Paris of the 1970s Through the Lens of a Soviet Tourist

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe’s major centers of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science and arts.

At the end of the Second World War, most Parisians were living in misery. Industry was ruined, housing was in short supply, and food was rationed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city underwent a massive reconstruction, with the addition of new highways, skyscrapers, and thousands of new apartment blocks. Beginning in the 1970s, French Presidents took a personal interest leaving a legacy of new museums and buildings.

These fascinating photographs captured street scenes of Paris in the 1970s through the eyes of a Soviet tourist:

 

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20 Beautiful Black and White Photos of Cats in Paris From the Mid-20th Century

You like Paris? Luckily, cats too!

Paris is a cat friendly capital and pampers its little friends. Many photographers were captivated by the stylish cats of Paris and succeeded in immortalizing them in this series of beautiful photos from the mid-20th century.

According to Moments Parfaits, 28% of French households own at least one cat, the most favorite animal de compagnie. In 2016, there were 12.7 million cats in France which means that some 400,000 cats might call Paris their home.

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Nine Members of the Surrealists Group in Paris, circa 1933

Paris in the 1920s was full of high hopes following the end of the First World War, the French economy boomed from 1921 until the great depression of the 1930s. ‘Les Annees Folles’ saw Paris re-establish itself as a capital of art, music and cinema.

Surrealism came to the forefront in the 1920s cultural scene, bringing new forms of expression to poetry with authors like André Breton, whose Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Robert Desnos. Émigré artists had created Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism in Paris before World War I, and included Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Piet Mondrian, along with French artists Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes.

Surrealists also included artists like Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Francis Picabia, sculptors like Jean Arp, Germaine Richier and even early film-makers, like Luis Buñuel and René Clair.

From left to right: Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel and Man Ray. (Photo by Anna Riwkin-Brick)

Anna Riwkin-Brick (1908–1970) was born in Gomel into a Jewish family in the Russian Empire and came to Sweden with her parents in 1914. She learned ballet for three years as a child at the Stockholm Whitlockska samskolan School, and danced professionally for some time before an injured foot put an early stop to her career.

She was employed as an assistant to the court photographer Moisé Benkow in 1927, and started her own portrait and dance photography studio in Stockholm in 1928. She married the journalist Daniel Brick in 1929 and marketed her work by displaying portraits of young writers and intellectuals from among her husband’s acquaintances. As a former dancer, she remained interested in dance as a subject of photography and illustrated a book on Swedish dance, Svensk Danskonst, published in 1932 and in the following year her photographs were exhibited in the international exhibition Dance and Movement in Paris.

Riwkin spent the summer months of 1933 in Paris along with her friend Thora Dardel, photographing street scenes, architecture, and artists. It was at this point that, through various contacts she had made, she gained the opportunity to meet and take portrait photographs of figures within the surrealist movement, such as Jean Arp, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray among others. Here’s another photograph of the Surrealists group in Paris:

Paris in 1980 Through Fascinating Photos

“I was 28 years old in 1980 and worked at the warehouse at Husqvarna AB and every week there was a man with his truck and picked up chainsaws and goods for delivery to the Paris area.”

Paris in July 1980

“The truck was nice and new 1980, I slept at night in the overbed. I went with him and stayed in Paris in different overnight places for five days. The money I had left was enough for a train ticket.”

These fascinating photos George Kindbom took street scenes of Paris in July 1980. “I had no contact with the people on the pictures, I touched me gently, quickly with the camera.”

Pre-party in the evening sun

After the party

Even the birds need love

Fashion model at the Eiffel Tower

Fashion model at the Eiffel Tower

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40 Haunting Vintage Photographs That Show Inside the Paris Catacombs in the 19th Century

“One of those places that everyone wants to see and no one wants to see again” is how Félix Nadar described the catacombs. Today the Paris Catacombs are illuminated by electric lights and friendly guides. But when Nadar descended into this “empire of death” in the 1860s artificial lighting was still in its infancy: the pioneering photographer had to face the quandary of how to take photographs in the subterranean dark.

The Paris catacombs were former underground quarries that were refitted to house skeletons. Nadar ventured into them to create an unprecedented series of photographs illuminated by flashlight. He used a magnesium lamp, visible in the lower right corner of the image.

Six or seven million skeletons were interred in the catacombs. Only sixteen carefully stacked protruding skulls on the wall are clearly distinguishable at left, yet they are all that is needed to indicate what the blackened squares in the distance represent.

Around the time that Nadar made this series of a hundred photographs in the catacombs, two of his beloved friends passed away. The photographer may have been exploring his own mortality when he embarked upon this series, but it was also a fashionable pursuit to descend into these macabre depths. In mid-19th century Paris, there were four annual visiting days for the catacombs, at which time they were filled with curious onlookers.

While the signage might now be sleeker, and photographs of the skull-lined walls are abundant, the catacombs retain some of the mystery that drew Nadar. They were already a curiosity for adventurous tourists in the early 19th century; a line that guided torch-carrying visitors is still visible on the ceiling of the entry tunnel. Nadar’s photographs, however, helped make the catacombs a popular destination. As the urbanist Matthew Gandy writes in The Fabric of Spac, the “subterranean photographs of Nadar played a key role in fostering the growing popularity of sewers and catacombs among middle-class Parisians, and from the 1867 Exposition onward the city authorities began offering public tours of underground Paris.”

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20 Interesting Vintage Photographs of Children Strolling With Their Baguettes on the Streets of Paris

What could be more traditionally French than the baguette, that long slender loaf of bread that has become an instantly recognized symbol of France? At any hour of the day, on the streets of any village, town, or city, you are likely to see the French strolling along with one of these elongated loaves tucked under their arm. That’s because this ubiquitous bread can accompany their breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

The baguette is thought as to have come from France, but it actually came from Vienna. The word “baguette” simply means wand, baton, or stick and refers to the shape of the bread. This term became attached to the thin, round sticks of bread we know today, in the early 20th century.

French traditions say that bread may only contain the following four things: flour, water, yeast and salt. Anything containing more than those things must not be called bread. A baguette is about 5 to 6 centimeters (2–2 1⁄2 inches) and a usual length of about 65 cm (26 in), although a baguette can be up to 1 m (39 in) long. Such a baguette usually weighs about 250 grams (8 3⁄4 oz). It is common to dip the bread into olive oil when it is eaten.

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Paul Gauguin Playing the Harmonium, ca. 1895

Painter Paul Gauguin playing a harmonium at the Paris studio of Alphonse Mucha, a Czech Art Nouveau painter, ca. 1895. How this came about — how Gauguin decided to strip off his pants and shoes and start playing that pump organ — we’ll probably never know.

Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 – May 8, 1903) styled himself and his art as “savage”. Although he began his artistic career with the Impressionists in Paris, during the late 1880s he fled farther and farther from urban civilization in search of an edenic paradise where he could create pure, “primitive” art. Yet his self-imposed exile to the South Seas was not so much an escape from Paris as a bid to become the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde. Gauguin cultivated and inhabited a dual image of himself as, on the one hand, a wolfish wild man and on the other, a sensitive martyr for art. His notoriety helped to promote his astonishing work, which freed color from mimetic representation and distorted form for expressive purposes. Gauguin pioneered the Symbolist art movement in France and set the stage for Fauvism and Expressionism.

His work was influential on the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and he is well known for his relationship with Vincent and Theo van Gogh. Gauguin’s art became popular after his death, partially from the efforts of dealer Ambroise Vollard, who organized exhibitions of his work late in his career and assisted in organizing two important posthumous exhibitions in Paris.

Portraits of Jean Cocteau in Bed with a Mask, Paris, 1927

Berenice Abbott portrayed Jean Cocteau, French surrealist artist, poet, writer, and filmmaker, sitting in bed with a somewhat vacant expression, which mirrors the expression on the paper mâché doll head he cradles in his left arm. Cocteau and the paper mâché doll are covered by a white sheet and the white, neutral color of the bed linens plays off the striped wallpaper on the background wall. As a whole this image echoes the contradictory pairings of objects and humans often found in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte.

The series of portraits Abbott took of Jean Cocteau, sitting or lying in bed, Abbott contended, could best capture the complexity of a person’s character. On another level, it points to Abbott’s interest in the interplay between the visible and invisible aspects of character. Cocteau addresses this very issue from a surrealist viewpoint by drawing out the complicated relationship between his body as object and himself as subject. While Cocteau chose to frame himself in this way, Abbott reacted to both his appearance and unconscious self in the taking of the photographs.

Portraiture served as Berenice Abbott’s primary livelihood while living in Paris in the mid-1920s. It marks the formative phase of Abbott’s realist photography, which she practiced throughout her career. Abbott’s approach to the practice of portraiture owes much to Man Ray in terms of flattering soft-focus, artificial lighting to create a sense of mystery and depth, among other details. Yet unlike Man Ray, Abbott used the portrait as a vehicle to reveal the sitter’s character, as gleaned through their communicative expression, physical presence, and intellectual depth. Abbott’s approach to portraits and her desire to highlight the unique qualities of her subjects can be seen as laying the foundation for artists working today such as Gillian Wearing who uses portraits to make statements about the relationship between public and private identities.

50 Fascinating Photos Capture Street Scenes of Paris in the 1980s

caramoul25 is a French photographer who had his first shot in 1950 at the age of 17 “with a small cube of black Kodak bakelite offered by my father, in Waulsort (Ardennes) during the summer holidays.”

“Last photo probably in a short time, because if the photos can become very old, the photographer will only leave a closed bag on all the wonders (?) That he will not have had time to capture.”

caramoul25 took these fascinating photos that documented street scenes of Paris during the 1980s.

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