If Part 1 was about why I stay in Paris, this one is about what staying actually looks like in practice.
The answer, it turns out, is projects. Multiple ones, running at the same time, with no fixed end date and no strict boundary between them. It sounds loose when I describe it that way, but there is more intention behind it than it might seem.
Some projects begin as ideas. Others begin as patterns you only notice after the fact.
Métropolitain and Quartier Asiatique were both deliberate from the start. I knew what I wanted to document before I raised the camera. The metro as a subject, its rhythms, its faces, its strange collective solitude, was something I identified early and decided to pursue seriously. Quartier Asiatique was the same: a conscious choice to document the neighbourhood I live in, the one I connect with most personally.
Cinémascope and Bruit de Vie came differently. I was not shooting with either of them in mind. I just kept shooting, and at some point I looked back at the archive and started noticing things. A recurring aspect ratio. A recurring mood. A way of framing sound and movement that I had been gravitating toward without realising it. Those two projects did not start as projects. They revealed themselves as ones.
That distinction matters to me. The intentional projects tell me where I want to go. The discovered ones tell me who I already am as a photographer. Both are necessary, and I have learned to trust both.
The way I actually work is probably not what most people would expect.
I do not block out time for specific projects. I do not go to a location with a single series in mind and come home when I have the shot. Everything runs in parallel, all the time, and the camera comes with me everywhere. When I do my groceries in the Quartier Asiatique, I bring it along. Not because I am planning to shoot, but because any moment can happen at any time, and the project lives in those unplanned moments as much as the deliberate ones.
That approach keeps everything alive simultaneously. A frame taken on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon on the way to the market can belong to Quartier Asiatique. The same walk might produce something that fits Bruit de Vie. The projects are lenses, not locations.
Of everything I am working on, Quartier Asiatique is the one that has taught me the most about patience.
I thought I could finish it within a year. That felt realistic at the time. But the project kept expanding on me, not because I lost focus, but because I kept learning. New angles. New light. New people who became regulars, then acquaintances, then subjects who trusted me enough to let me photograph them properly.
A project like this is not finished when you have enough photos. It is finished when the photos can tell a story you are proud of. I am not there yet. And I have made peace with that, because the process of getting there is where most of the real work happens.
That is what the long game actually means. Not a grand strategy or a career plan. Just the willingness to stay with something past the point where it stops being easy, past the original deadline, past the version of the project you first imagined, until it becomes something more honest than what you started with.
Paris keeps giving me the material. I just have to keep showing up.