Nick Miners Photography

Earlier in the month, pretty much on a whim, I booked a return train to Paris for my fam­ily and me so we spent most of yes­ter­day in this fam­ous European cap­ital. We star­ted (as we almost always do) in Mont­martre, which while very touristy, has some very col­our­ful shops to pho­to­graph and an unbeat­able view of the city from in front of the Basil­ique du Sacré Coeur. Des­pite this, I enjoy vis­it­ing the area less and less each time, as there are an increas­ing num­ber of hawkers, blaggers and out­right con artists, all try­ing to take advant­age of the gull­ible tour­ist, and it’s a real effort just to avoid mak­ing eye con­tact or enga­ging in a con­ver­sa­tion with one of them.

After get­ting our fill of the pan­or­ama, we headed south to the Centre Georges Pomp­idou, a gal­lery and mod­ern art museum. Designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in a style remin­is­cent of London’s Lloyd’s Build­ing, the build­ing has most of the infra­struc­ture and struc­tural sup­port on the out­side, leav­ing the interior free of clut­ter and with ample room for the inter­est­ing stuff. A set of escal­at­ors take you up inside a glass pipe which runs out­side the front of the build­ing, all the way to the view­ing gal­lery at the top, where the Eif­fel Tower can be seen to the west, and while one of the two gal­ler­ies is cur­rently closed, there is a very good exhib­i­tion of the work of Pierre Soulages.

Before leav­ing we vis­ited another fam­ous Parisian cathed­ral, Notre Dame de Paris, which stands on a island in the middle of the river Seine, and I cre­ated some abstracts using the vari­ous col­oured lights of shops, cars and traffic sig­nals. Then with sore feet and tired eyes, we headed back to Gare du Nord to catch our train back to St Pan­cras Inter­na­tional and head home.

Tags: abstract, architecture, cathedrals, Eiffel tower, France, Montmartre, Notre Dame, Paris, Pompidou, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Sacre Coeur