The Bibliothèque nationale de France is the National Library of France, located in Paris on the banks of the Seine. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. First announced on Bastille Day, 1988 by President François Mitterrand, it was finally opened on 15th December 1996 after huge cost overruns and technical difficulties related to its high-rise design.
The Musée d’Orsay is one of my favourite museums in Paris. It is housed in the former Gare d’Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It is probably best known for its extensive collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces (the largest in the world) by such painters such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin and Van Gogh
Lyon has an old town and the patterns and colours of the pantiled roofs make an interesting composition. The scene is almost timeless – only the modern Velux windows suggest that this is modern times.
A summer’s evening in Lyon. I saw these three men and liked their arrangement and the pastel colours of the buildings behind them. I wanted something more in the picture and so I waited. Then suddenly one of them produced a piece of paper and handed it the other. That was the moment to take the shot. I don’t know what the paper was, maybe it was a contract. It could be anything in fact but The Contract sounded fitting for a title.
Taken in Lyon. I liked the diffusion of the frosted glass of the bus shelter and the fact that the legs and feet were sharp below the frosted glass. Their heads were hidden by an empty grey panel presumably there to take advertising. I wanted something to fill the board. Just 2 minutes away around the corner was a closed-down café with grafitti and paintings on it. Above the window, there were three painted heads. It just shouted at me that these were the heads that should be behind that bus shelter.