Supplemental:

Dalida:

And Soolking vs Dalida

And this, really heart-breaking, considering her life story

(english subtitles)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalida

Today was the day that D would "meet me in Paris" and to kill time until 2.30 PM I did a lot of hanging around in Jardins de Luxembourg. Although many people get as far as the basin, it is an extensive park, with tennis courts, a creche/atelier for kids, some basketball courts and many paths for the joggers. I nursed a coffee for over an hour at the buvette, then wandered back towards the basin where nautical manoeuvres were in full swing already. €4,- buys you your own yacht, that you can own for 30 minutes and is a "thing" fathers like to do with their children. Also some lone captains about, running around the basin. I used to do this with my own son, when he was about 8 and a very energetic child. The shifting wind directions had him running around the basin at least 10 times when the wind was up. But today it was a lacklustre affair, but great fun nonetheless. The yachts fly the flags of many nations, and friendly races were going on between the US and Denmark, all in good cheer. When I looked at my watch, it turned out I even had to hurry to make it on time, and I took a bus to the St Michel station and the RER from there to Gare du Nord, the fastest option.

It was great seeing each other after a week. We dropped D's bags at the hotel, had a quick coffee at the bakery on the corner, then took the bus to Montmartre. We retraced my own walk from yesterday, but now we went to the Musée de Montmartre. When you stand in front of it, it seems nothing out of the ordinary, but it hides treasures inside: the recreated artist's studio of Susan Valadon and the gardens, which also offer a wonderful view of the vineyard below. We wandered about the garden, smelling the Damascene roses, admiring the views and sitting in the little arbor at the far end of the gardens. "Exit through the giftshop", push open the door to the street and you emerge from a different world into the present again. We took the bus back to Gare du Nord, showered and went out to dinner. A "tiffin" meal set for D, Ghee Masala Dosa for me, finished with coffee for me and "the best masala chai I've ever had" for D.

As D installed herself in the hotel, I went out for some night shots. In the previous days I had decided against this, as this end of the R Faubourg St Denis is pretty on edge. "Precarité" is a very real thing here, and everything is on the razor's edge, no margins, and you see it in people's faces. It also means, tempers can flare up, easily and quickly. Yesterday night, one of the cigarette seller's wares was so obviously fake, that a group of customers complained after buying a package of "Marlboros". The sellers work in groups, with a "patron" doing the coordination, supplies and also security. Quickly two groups of men were shouting at each other. The decisive factor was that the shopkeepers decided they'd had enough of the cigarette-wallas and brought in their own security who chased the sellers to the end of the street. Rest restored.

I have a way of photographing unobtrusively and quickly. Nevertheless, I felt the rush of adrenaline as I walked around the block, well aware that I would be chased to the end of the street as well if I was too "in your face". This is an incredibly hard-working area, much of the work just or entirely outside of the law. Earlier, when we had coffee, we observed a good number of police vans going by, filled with men. Probably the result of a mass arrest of refugees in the area. In many ways Gare du Nord is a city "gate". Well guarded and a tactical demarcation line between the Paris that's kept out of sight of most tourists and the Paris of the left bank and the Marais so to speak. Every once in a while, riots break out in or around Gare du Nord if the police's grip is too tight, things relax somewhat and the cycle begins again. This area too will in all likelihood be cleaned up for "2024" and I really wonder how that will go down. There's an economy here, and social structures, even if they're not the structures the French state or the Paris Municipalité find desirable.

Got a good shot of the pani puri man and that pleased me the most tonight. He saw me working, but endured. And his pani puri are lovely. A late night snack.

Gladly done, Nikki

I coach a few people with their photography, and the question always is: "what shall I photograph?". Always I tell people to photograph what they find interesting and move towards that, bodily. To me the camera is an extension of the body, not of the eye and photography is mainly gesture and timing. Another reason why long lenses, and photographing from afar are not for me. When we travel, we inhabit places, we connect to other people's personae through our own, even if briefly and only once. Photographing then becomes performative gesture, a tracing, a line of sight, but not sight itself.

It's a pretty common platitude that a photograph can be a window, or a mirror. To me what differentiate "snapshots" from photographs is that the latter are mirrors, not just windows. At least, that's the ideal, and sometimes I make photographs that reflect, rather than show.

I love Snow White in the Metro with "Theatre" all over the wall.

Yesterday a day devoted to Art-as-strategy and today a day for hanging out and buying books.

Art was had at Musée Nissim de Camondo and at Jacquemart-André.

A side note: D's father died late October last year, and my mother early November. Previously in 2018, I had buried two very good friends, and in early 2019 we buried my mother's one brother, my uncle.

Which was why NdC resonated immensely with us. I had seen it before, but, more as a museum. This time around, the house declared itself as an expression of deep mourning and depression. The entire Plaine de Monceau, with its 10 or so houses, spread across 59 street numbers bears the imprint of the families who lived there, at one time "Monceau" serving as a synonym for "Jewish Parvenu". Just like "vitrines" became covetable for collectors who needed them to best display their priceless "bibelots", so NdC itself is a "maison vitrine" of a jewish emigré banker-collector, who drew much antisemitic vitriol as he bought up the furniture and art stemming from crumbling chateaus. In "The Hare With Amber Eyes" Edmund de Waal describes this milieu of interrelated Jewish banking and trading families. In his case the Ephrussis, grain merchants from Odessa, just like the Camondos settled in Paris from Istanbul.

There is one photograph of Moîse de Camondo, after the loss of Nissim, ill and depressed, born down by mourning. He had sought to become "plus royaliste que le Roi" through his collecting and displaying, and had given his son to France. NdC is evidence rather of art as a strategy for assimilation, a mania for Ancien Regime art that is as much aspiration as it is admiration. To his daughter Beatrice, who thought that having hunted with Goering would protect her and her two children, it turned out that the Camondo dream of assimilation by means of art and philanthropy, was just that, a dream. Wandering to the house with its fluid succession of room after room, we descended again to the ground floor and the kitchen and were quite startled to discover the two, separated sinks in the scullery: clearly, keeping kosher was not something Moïse de Camondo had jettisoned, witness also his gorgeously bound "machzorim", the special prayer books for the High Holidays. Touching as well is the little cabinet with the photos that we made in 1936 when the house was to open as a public museum. Moïse stipulated that nothing of the furniture was to be moved in any way, except "a few small pieces like chairs and stools to enable the public to circulate freely". Something the curators have abided by up to this day.

Resting in the shade in Parc Monceau we reflected that there is a direct connection between this house and the artists' studios we saw at Rue Cortot. Isaac de Camondo collected the impressionists and it is his collection that is the backbone of the Musée D'Orsay collection. The Ephrussis, likewise, collected the then avantgarde artists, and I meditated for a bit on this connection between such different parts of the city.

Next was Jacquemart- André, an altogether different proposition. This museum too is a "maison vitrine", but the ambiance couldn't be more different from Moïse de Camondo's tasteful and harmonious arrangements. We had tea on the terrace (and a very nice terrace it is), then found ourselves outside again on wide, empty and rather boring Bvd Hausmann. Weirdly, this corner of Paris can be quite problematic in its public transport offerings. Which made it rather late in the day when we returned to our hotel across from the Paan sellers. One day left of our Paris vacation.

Onwards to today and the last day of my and our excursion. It's tempting to cram everything one wanted to have done in that last day before leaving, so we needed to forcefully act against that impulse. Which we did by hanging out, first in the Marais, then crossing the Seine to the left bank, where I bought some books at Shakespeare & Co, also to show the bookstore to D, who'd never been there. We walked to Jardins de Luxembourgh via R. des Écoles and the Pantheon and then sought and found two chairs under the trees and read.

Today wasn't a day for long photography sessions, even though I photographed at NdC with the iPhone, and was able to cram in a little detour by bus this morning.

And that was it: a working holiday in Paris. This week produced at least 2 good photographs, and afforded us ample opportunity to do what we like doing: hanging out in a city we know well and love. Thank you for following.

Thank you very much for an interesting report and for your photos. I too feel great sadness at Musée Nissim de Camondo. It's a heartbreaking story.

Great report. Looks like you also need to visit the Albert Kahn museum and gardens in Boulogne Billancourt. The gardens reopen this September, but we will have to wait until 2021 to visit the amazing rebuilt museum. We will never see all 72,000 of his autochromes, but even the old presentation of his "planetary archives" from the beginning of the 20th century was remarkable.

With all the English speakers' interest in the Nissim de Camondo museum, collection, story, I remain amazed that the book by Pierre Assouline, Le Dernier des Camondo has not yet been translated into English.

Indeed.

BTW, I feel that the Musée Guimet likewise is a "companion museum" because of its location but also for its focus on the Asian art and "Japonisme". Fortunately, that museum is not being renovated.

Interesting you should mention that, for I bought a copy today at Gibert Jeune. Also good to see that so much by Assouline is still in print and on the shelves, so I also bought his "Golem". I also see that a pretty good monograph by Beatrice Philippe on Jewish life during the Belle Époque is also only available in English.*https://www.albin-michel.fr/ouvrages...-9782226061300

But an expansive view of the jewish milieu of this era can of course also be found in Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Charles Swann is, after all, closely modelled on Charles Ephrussi. My own family is (very) distantly related to the Weil family from which Proust stems, and it makes this era and milieu all the more interesting to me.*

What I feel is slightly disappointing about the NdC presentation is that it downplays the function of 18th century art, to the Camondo's and similar families, as a strategem to simultaneously assimilate "Frenchness" and be assimilated into it. I feel it speaks highly to our own times and circumstances, especially because all of it turned out to be so illusionary.*