MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Photographs of Paris by Yvon

Man Ray: A man in love with a woman from a different era. I see a photograph! Luis Bunuel: see a film!
Gil: I see an insurmountable problem!

Salvador Dali: I see a rhinoceros!

Woody Allen: Midnight in Paris

The opening sequence to Midnight in Paris begins with a shot of the Eiffel Tower (naturally) at dawn. As the day progresses other landmarks appear - the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde, the Pont de Neuf - interspersed with scenes of people hurrying through the streets. An afternoon shower arrives, blows over and by nightfall we are back at the Eiffel Tower. In three minutes we get an effectively understated and elliptical impression of the city so that as soon as Owen Wilson turns up to the hotel you know he has not just fallen in love with Paris, it’s already everything he has imagined it to be. There aren’t many cities that can get that kind of treatment. New York is too noisy and overwhelmed by skyscrapers, Rome used to in the 1950s and London almost could except, honestly, it doesn’t have a reputation as a romantic town. The other reason the sequence works is that Paris has been so thoroughly photographed that even if you haven’t been there you will recognize the places. You have seen them before.

About five years ago I made some enquiries to a respectable photographic dealer about Yvon photographs and got the response that they were very cheap; in other words, why bother? Well, it’s true; you still shouldn’t have to pay more than a couple of dollars for a vintage photo postcard by Yvon, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t good. Cheap can also mean undervalued, or in Yvon’s case, there is so much of his work floating about that you can reassess his place in history and anoint him to the pantheon of great French photographers if you want; that isn’t going to budge prices. Good. We are lucky, because in an era when fine art photography is increasingly being marketed out of the reach of a lot of people, it’s important that we can still buy an excellent image like the one at the top of the page for next to nothing. It is among Yvon’s most famous shots, taken sometime in the 1930s when Paris was the centre of surrealism, and if he had been in the right circle and only released a few prints, today it would be considered a masterpiece of French photography. 

In 2010 W. W Norton published a book dedicated to Yvon’s photographs by Robert Stevens. Not having seen the book in the flesh it is hard to comment except that several reviews carry the observation that Yvon invented the Paris of our imaginations. By that the critics mean that when we think of Paris in the last century we unconsciously conjure up images he saw first. I doubt they believed that. Paris in the 1920s and 30s does have vivid connotations for a lot of us but the scenes are intimate - smoky cafes and jazz clubs inhabited by left bank artists and intellectuals – not his grand vistas. It is unlikely that several critics hit upon the same notion without a little help, so we can assume the book gave it to them but so far as photography was concerned, Yvon’s commercial instincts drew him to a Paris everyone would recognize and he sought locations already instilled in popular consciousness. Take as an example the study of the Palais de Trocadéro through the framework of the Eiffel Tower. By 1900 photographs from almost exactly the same viewpoint were being produced as postcards, half tone, photochrom prints and other processes so even people who hadn’t been to Paris knew the scene well.

In the 1900s Eugene Atget used to get up at four in the morning, pack his camera and tripod and trudge across Paris just to capture a particular street corner at sunrise. Such dedication has never been that uncommon among photographers but it required something more than simply forgoing sleep. If walking the streets and observing various features appeared to be a desultory, aimless waste of time, it actually required discipline and a practiced ability at observing small details. In effect the photographer had to see and compose the image, sometimes weeks before it was eventually taken. It is obvious from Yvon’s photographs that he subjected himself to the same rigours as Atget. He didn’t just stumble on these scenes on his walks but noted them, calculated the best conditions for the photograph he wanted and then returned at the right time, regardless of the hour. Dawn was best, when the weak light created the strongest atmosphere and the streets were empty of people. They are rare in his images. He probably saw them as an inconvenience unless, like the bookseller above, they represented an essential element of the Parisian street. 

The big distinction between Atget and Yvon is that Atget’s work was much more personal. His city was represented by small shopfronts and anonymous backstreets and often as not the photograph could have feasibly been taken in any French or, for that matter European, town as Paris. Working just a few years later, Yvon rarely published an image that wasn’t immediately identifiable as being Paris. This difference didn’t come down to a question of how closely one or the other observed or how they defined the city but their market. Atget advertised himself as a photographer of scenes for artists, a job description he invented himself for a business with a limited but faithful clientele. Yvon wanted the general public. With that in mind he published his photographs as postcards and small snaps in paper wallets. He could have found work with a magazine or a publisher but by going out on his own he kept a couple of things Atget also valued; independence and integrity. 

What really distinguishes Yvon’s photographs from the enormous pile of clichés is a particular atmosphere. Fog was his friend and the best time to make use of it was just before dawn in late autumn. Some of the critics not only compared Yvon to Atget but to Brassaï (or rather, Stephens did) and presumably they weren’t just thinking of the two photographers coincidentally wandering through the city but an atmosphere. Shooting around Montparnasse and Montmartre, Brassaï used fog to heighten the seedy and slightly dangerous ambience. You get the impression his subjects regarded the weather as useful cover and protection.  You can also date Brassaï’s work to the 1930s because of the cars and the clothes people wore. In Yvon’s work, Paris in the fog became stately, baroque and somewhat gloomy, and it was timeless too.  A lot of Yvon’s photographs could have been taken at any time fifty years either side of when they actually were. 

A photographer who set out to sell as much of his work as he could via the cheapest and most accessible formats available would hardly care how posterity judged him. Even so, Yvon (his real name incidentally was Pierre Yves-Petit) deserved a monograph. If some of the claims made in his favour are dubious, compare his work instead to his rivals, the dozens of other companies plying the postcard and snapshot market and it becomes apparent that he worked harder, cared more about his work and had standards that wouldn’t allow him to compromise. Like the others, he tended to keep his distance when he shot a scene, framing the point of interest in the centre so there could be no ambiguity about what the viewer was supposed to be looking at, but his work is better than average because he chose vantage points that encouraged the viewer to look into the image and see its details. If he wasn’t the genius the critics declare he was he didn’t have to be. The real mark of his photographs wasn’t that they show the Paris of your imagination but one he had an affinity for. That was Gil’s discovery at the end of Midnight in Paris too. You know at the end as he walks off into the rain with Gabrielle that he will never meet Hemingway, Gertrude Stein or the others again but their Paris vanished years ago.

Apart from the postcard of the rhinoceros, these photos come from an album of some 80 miniature views collected some time in the 1920s.

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MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

NIGHT

 Night scenes in real photo postcards

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” 

Vincent Van Gogh

 Even though night photography was commercially feasible by the 1880s, you get the impression it didn’t catch on because photographers weren’t particularly inspired until the beginning of the 20^th century, when skyscrapers were lit up from within and floodlights illuminated their surfaces. Something profound had happened in the interim. The lighting of the city at night went from street level to several storeys above. What it radiated down wasn’t light so much as vision. Cast against the darkness, towers appeared as majestic monuments to the new age. Evelyn Waugh hated the Senate House in Bloomsbury when it was completed in 1937 and George Orwell imagined the Ministry of Truth in 1984 was housed there. Waugh made a point of hating everything modern and if Orwell didn’t go so far he also regarded its imposing presence on the skyline as a threat. This postcard of Senate House was posted on the 18^th of June 1939. Just over a year later the lights across London would be switched off and the city returned to darkness as the Blitz began.

 The Nazis had already left their mark on Berlin’s Skyline. In 1933 they set fire to the Reichstag. Otto Junga Verlag published the postcard around 1928, when the dome was still intact, and when the company was producing several series of Berlin by night. Though it is a photograph the lighting is odd and unnatural. Both the moon and the lights emanating from the building would have been too weak to give detail to the façade and there is no evidence of any other outside light source close enough. It wasn’t difficult to concoct a night scene. A dark filter over the lens and the moon and clouds added in the darkroom were the only requirements. The effect in this study is almost anti-modern. The Reichstag looks gothic and ominous.

In 1910 Georges Claude gave night photography its greatest gift, though it couldn’t be properly appreciated for another decade. His original neon lights glowed red and orthochromatic film, the cheapest and most practical stock available couldn’t register them correctly. In the 1920s panchromatic film became more accessible and argon and mercury vapour were being used in neon lights to give more colour. Even better, the neon tubes were being twisted into letters and shapes and avenues like Kurfürstendamm in Berlin were ablaze with them. A photographer could stand across the street, snap at the cafes and bars on the other side with a hand held camera and get something like this; a patchwork of electric words suspended against the darkness. It looked like art. Café des Westens had held some of the earliest cabarets in Berlin and was a haunt for Hugo Ball and other artists. By the mid 1920s when this photograph was produced it had a reputation as one of the fashionably hedonistic centres of Weimar culture.

 If Vienna’s moment as a centre of modernist ideas was passing by the 1920s it still had the artifacts and one was the Reisenrad, the giant Ferris wheel in the Prater. Ferris wheels were elemental symbols of early modernism. Their skeletal frames and engineering appeared impracticable and the inventor, George Ferris, had to fight hard to convince the committee overseeing the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that something so enormous yet insubstantial looking could actually work. When the Reisenrad was built in 1897 it wasn’t as big as Ferris’ original, the Grande Roue in Paris or the Great Wheel in London’s Earls Court but by 1920 those had been dismantled or demolished so it held it’s place as the biggest until the 1980s. It became a symbol of Vienna the way the Eiffel Tower was of Paris and was recognizable even using a favourite trick among commercial photographers of slowing the exposure to reduce the wheel to ribbons of light.

In 2010 a book of Pierre Yves Petit’s photographs of Paris was published carrying the recommendation that he was the equal of Atget, Kertész and Brassaï when it came to capturing the atmosphere of Paris. Working under the studio name Yvon, he took thousands of photographs of the city, preferring the dawn and early evening when the fog clung to the streets, searching for that essence even people who had never visited the city would recognize as Parisian. Naturally, the Eiffel Tower made a regular appearance. When it was built for the 1889 World’s Fair the electric illumination of cities was just becoming realizable but still confined to the exteriors of buildings where it had the most dramatic effect. The Eiffel Tower carried electric lighting early on though it wasn’t until in the 1920s that the entire façade was dressed in lights. The claims the book makes don’t ring true. Most of his photographs are too impersonal, but when you see details like the silhouetted statue of the bull at the bottom here you know that words like genius or master don’t matter.

In 1938 it was Glasgow’s time to host an international expo and the centrepiece of the Empire Exhibition was Thomas Tait’s Empire Tower. Tait was one of Scotland’s leading modernist architects, designing significant art deco buildings such as Kodak House in London, Saint Andrew’s House in Edinburgh and the pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Built on a hill, the Empire Tower stood 91 metres tall, had three observation decks and was intended to be a schematic image of Scotland. The construction from steel represented Glasgow’s place in the shipping and steel industries, which were then the backbone of the UK’s industrial economy. The exhibition ran from May to December 1938. A year later Britain was at war with Germany. Because the tower was considered an obvious target for air raids it was demolished. The Valentine Company produced dozens of photographs of the tower. Their attempts at hand colouring , this one anyway, can be considered a failure. The tower deserved better.

Back to the streets, to the Thames embankment sometime in the 1930s. Authentic night photography spurned the flash or any other form of artificial lighting. The idea was to use available light either to abstract the image or make it as naturalistic as possible. Technically, to capture this scene the photographer required an open aperture, a slow film and a shutter speed somewhere around 1/15^th of a second. Anything slower risked reducing the lights from the traffic in the background to streaks. It also required a time at night when there weren’t likely to be many pedestrians. It’s an entirely posed study of course but there’s nothing wrong with that. It gets something of the desolate mood and the mystery of London away from the life and noise of Piccadilly and the West End theatres. In the 1930s Patrick Hamilton wrote the trilogy of novels collected as Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Mostly they were located in bars and cheap boarding houses and though none of the major characters tried scratching a living as a street artist, in their most dejected moments, as they shuffled past the river, cap down and collar up, they probably passed this figure, oblivious to his own straitened circumstances and stoic forbearance.

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NIGHT