When everybody is coming to Paris, why do I have to leave?
I mean that genuinely, not as a rhetorical flourish. At some point during my first year here, I caught myself looking at flight prices and travel itineraries the way photographers often do, always planning the next destination, the next set of streets, the next city with a different light. And then I stopped and asked myself: what exactly am I looking for out there that is not already here?
I could not find a good answer.
Paris is one of those rare cities that does not sit still long enough to be fully known. It has its permanent residents, working across every industry you can think of, living out ordinary lives that happen to be set against one of the most visually dense backdrops in the world. And layered on top of that, every single day, tourists arrive in volumes that few cities anywhere can match. The energy is constant. The cast of characters never stops rotating.
There are only a handful of cities on earth with this kind of aura, where the local and the transient exist in such close, complicated proximity. Where a morning commuter and a first-time visitor can share the same frame and both belong in it.
I have not come close to exhausting it. And honestly, I do not think it is possible to. The idea that a photographer could reach a point where there is nothing left to shoot in Paris is, to me, genuinely nonsensical. The city keeps changing. The light keeps changing. The people keep arriving. There will always be another frame.
So why leave?
There are also parts of Paris that have barely been touched by photographers at all. Take Barbès, for example.
I want to be straightforward about this: Barbès has a reputation. It is one of the rougher neighbourhoods in the city, and that reputation is not entirely unfounded. It is precisely why most photographers do not go there, and precisely why I find it so compelling. Unexplored territory is one of the most powerful concepts in street and documentary photography. When a place has not been documented, the images do not yet exist. That is not a deterrent. That is an invitation.
I have not started shooting there yet. But it is on my list, and I intend to get to it seriously. There is a life happening in Barbès that deserves to be seen.
For now, I am starting closer to home. Literally.
The Asian Quarter (Quartier Asiatique), which anchors one of the projects on this site, is the neighbourhood where I live. It is also the kind of environment I grew up around, being Asian myself, and there is a familiarity there that changes how I move through it with a camera. I am not an outsider in the same way I am elsewhere in Paris. I recognise things. I understand the rhythms.
That does not make it easier to photograph, but it makes it more personal. And personal, I have found, tends to produce the most honest work.
Staying put is a choice, and it is one I make deliberately. Not because I am not curious about other places, but because I am not finished here. Not even close.
Paris keeps offering. I keep showing up.
That feels like enough of a reason.