Paris

The Paris you photograph is barely 160 years old. In 1853 the emperor Napoleon III — nephew of the famous Napoleon — handed a determined official named Baron Haussmann the power to remake a crowded, cholera-ridden medieval city. Over seventeen years crews demolished tens of thousands of buildings and cut long, straight avenues lined with near-identical cream-limestone façades under grey zinc roofs. It gave Paris its unmistakable look and its light; it also erased whole old quarters, and the poet Charles Baudelaire mourned that a city changes faster than a human heart.

Paris learned to love what it first hated. When Gustave Eiffel raised his iron tower for the 1889 fair, held to mark a century since the Revolution, a group of famous writers and artists signed a furious letter calling it a useless, monstrous chimney. The tower was meant to stand only twenty years; it survived because its great height made it perfect for the new wireless telegraph. Meanwhile the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain filled with painters and writers — Picasso, Hemingway and the rest of the “Lost Generation” — who could nurse a single coffee for a whole afternoon of argument.

Two stories show how the city guards its treasures. In 1911 a museum handyman simply walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his coat; the two-year manhunt turned Leonardo's small portrait into the most famous painting on earth. And in April 2019 the world watched Notre-Dame's spire collapse in flames after 850 years — then watched it rebuilt, stone scrubbed pale again, and reopened in December 2024. To walk Paris is to feel all these layers at once.