Creative directions

The day started with a post-breakfast chat in the hotel with P, A our tutor M and several others. People discussed how they were getting on with taking photos for the documentary project and with the trip in general. I expressed some of my difficulties in saying what I felt I wanted to say in a single image. The importance to me of narrative, either contemporary or across the sweep of history. The resonance I feel in historic locations. How do I say that in a single picture without text M suggested that maybe I was really a film-maker. Not just for the moving images of live action but also using cutting between images to provide narrative. I think it also points towards putting together books of images. Something to think about.
At breakfast I'd also talked with A (a different A - there are three of them on the trip) about the Shoah memorial. Lacking a guidebook I'd seen a sign to it the day before that seemed to point to a closed building - but surely that wasn't it. She thought I probably hadn't been in the right place. So after the creative discussion I headed off into the Marais again - my favourite start to the day, walking across Blvd Beaumarchais and through the Place des Vosges. I passed a schoolyard, with children playing football and the neat box-hedged pattern garden in front of the Hotel de Sens - where Marguerite de Valois (aka La Reine Margot of the film) stayed briefly at the beginning of the 17th century many years after the gruesome events of her post-wedding feast.
And so I found the Shoah memorial, not the place I'd seen before and definitely open. Strict airport-style security to get in and a modern memorial above - in the centre of it a broad bronze column embossed with the names of the camps and the Warsaw ghetto. Below an eternal flame memorial and a museum. So many stories, not just of the deportations and the camps but also about the strands of anti-semitism in France and the rest of Europe that stretch back long before the Holocaust.

And a wall of photographs of children.

Like the seemingly endless list of names back outside - over 70,000 names of people deported from Paris to the camps.

Almost overwhelming.

Which is why it was such a fantastic coincidence on coming out that I caught up with A, who had also just been inside. We found a cafe and had a tea and a chat, first about what we had just seen, and then about other things. About photography and creativity. About narrative and things that touch us. I told her about the pictures I took at the schools cross-country and the little group of girls, all from the same school. waiting for one of the last boys in the race but from their school and so they were cheering him on. One girl in particular seemed so genuinely excited and supportive. I tried to capture it in a picture although not sure I did. I saw her again at the finishing line in the next race, still cheering on friends. She is what sport is all about. I wish I could have taken a picture to do her story justice. And we talked about other experiences - coming later to the course than some.
And she told me about blipfoto, which is why I am here.
In an instant almost two hours went by until we decided we should probably make something of the rest of the afternoon and headed off our separate ways.
I wandered on, taking pictures of shops and people and the river. I met up with J and A and we had some food on St Germain. J headed back to the hotel, A went to an exhibition and I went to the Pont des Artes and took more pictures. Back through the Louvre and to the hotel. A late meal with P at the cafe on Place des Vosges - there was live music on, a woman singer accompanied by a man on guitar. We saw A, K and M walking back - a feeling of belonging to a place, when you accidentally meet people you know out on the streets.