SPACE 1 : PARIS PEOPLE BY LEE WADDELL

Exhibition dates. 24 Aug - 4 Sept 2022
Opening Reception : Thur 25 Aug 2022, 6:00 - 8.30pm.

PARIS PEOPLE

I am a street photographer,  or to put it another way, I have always seen photography as a means of capturing and saving the images of things seen by chance.  Also I realised many years ago that the most interesting pictures often show people, or scenes where people have left evidence of their passing.

This kind of photography means finding subjects in un-staged poses. The city street is the obvious place to go looking, both for the interesting signs of human presence and for portraits of individuals going about whatever happens to be their daily business when they come into your sight.

There is still a problem.  People may not like being photographed by a stranger and without having given their permission.  This was the difficulty I had to overcome when I spent time in Paris and wanted to record the images of those interesting looking Parisians who were always likely to tell me that it was against French law to take a person’s picture without first asking them. To ask would spoil the spontaneity and candid nature of the picture.

I realised there was an exception to this guardedness. When Parisians gathered to march in the streets in protesting demonstrations, they didn’t mind being photographed.

The framed pictures in this show record scenes that I came across while walking every day around my neighbourhood of Montparnasse. The rest were taken in the space of about an hour, during a demonstration against proposed changes to the laws governing labour rights. I wanted those photos to show the action of the protest unspooling as I saw it on the Boulevard Raspail on the twelfth of November, 2013.

The concept is simple.  A photograph is the preserved image of a single moment.  Sometimes the durable replica of that moment may be curious, beautiful or meaningful enough, in some way or another, to make me hope that other viewers may see the same charm that I did when I happened upon these scenes and saw these people in the autumns of Paris 2013-2017.

The Exhibition view