🇫🇷 💌 The Paris Love Letter #141

VISITING PARIS
Which Paris is Yours?

Since we’ve been spending our week diving deep into the archives and the "eyes" of the great photographers, I wanted to share something practical to help you see the city through your own lens.

Choosing where to plant your flag in Paris changes your entire experience. The morning light in the 7th feels different than the midnight energy in the 11th. To help you navigate this, I’ve pulled this infographic from our 77-page Paris Neighborhood Guide.

Whether you are looking for the "postcard" feel of the center or the quiet, Haussmannian elegance of the west, this is your quick-start map.

You can download this infographic by clicking here.

A Quick Favor: Help Me Shape the Letter

As The Paris Love Letter grows, I want to make sure I’m sending you exactly what you need, whether that’s deep historical dives, practical "on-the-ground" tips, or the best hidden wine bars in the 10th.

I’ve put together a very short survey to get to know your interests better. If you have 60 seconds, I’d love to hear from you.

Linking You to Paris

➡️ The cheapest nicest hotels in Paris: Condé Nast Traveller rounds up genuinely stylish Paris hotels that can come in under £200 a night, with quick, vibe-forward notes on what each place is like and where it sits in the city.

➡️ 10 eagerly awaited exhibitions worth travelling to Paris for in 2026: EnVols rounds up the most anticipated Paris museum exhibitions (with dates and venues). It’s a quick way to see what’s worth planning a trip (or a rainy afternoon) around.

➡️ Where to Stay in Paris in the Spring: Paris Discovery Guide breaks down four great neighborhoods for a spring trip (Marais, Gros Caillou/7th, 1st near the royal gardens, and Saint-Germain) and explains what each area is best for.

➡️ 12 of the best museums in Paris: Lonely Planet’s guide spotlights 12 of Paris’s best museums with quick “best for” notes and practical visiting details so you can choose what actually fits your trip.

➡️ Jodie Foster: An American Oscar-Winner in Paris: The New York Times profiles Jodie Foster as she steps into a Paris-set French-language role in A Private Life, digging into why director Rebecca Zlotowski wanted her and Foster’s unusual connection to French and to Paris.

PARIS PHOTOGRAPHY
Paris, Photographed into a Myth (1850 to Now)

Paris has been photographed so relentlessly that it is easy to forget the images did not only record the city. They helped invent it. Before Paris became a destination, it became a feeling. Photographers had a lot to do with that.

Here are seven names, roughly one per era, who shaped how the world imagines Paris.

1) Charles Marville

Marville was commissioned to photograph a Paris that was actively being remade. Streets widened, neighborhoods cut open, old stone cleared out to make room for a new order. His work sits right at the moment when the city begins to transform into the Paris we recognize today.

There is a quiet gravity to these images. Paris looks clean, wet, and strangely still, like a stage between acts.

2) Eugène Atget

Atget called his photographs “documents for artists,” but what he really made was a portrait of ordinary Paris before ordinary Paris vanished. Shop windows, courtyards, staircases, workers, and corners that would never make a postcard.

His genius is how reverent the everyday becomes in his frames. Paris looks less like a spectacle and more like a lived-in world with a pulse.

3) Ilse Bing

Ilse Bing brings Paris into the modern age without draining it of poetry. Her work has energy, strong geometry, and a kind of bright intelligence. The city becomes sharper, faster, and more electric.

If Marville gives us Paris as a historical turning point, and Atget gives us Paris as an archive, Bing gives us Paris as modern life, elegant and restless.

4) Henri Cartier-Bresson

Cartier-Bresson is the name that always comes up because he earned it. He photographed Paris as timing, as geometry, as a quick human truth that appears and disappears.

His Paris feels intelligent. Not because it is intellectual in a museum sense, but because it suggests there is an order hiding inside the city’s chaos, and occasionally it reveals itself.

5) Robert Doisneau

Doisneau is one of the great architects of Parisian tenderness. Children, workers, lovers, the small theater of everyday life. He photographed people with warmth, humor, and a lightness that never feels shallow.

His Paris is less about grandeur and more about humanity. The romance lives in the ordinary, which is the only place romance ever really survives.

6) Elliott Erwitt

Erwitt’s Paris has a sense of humor, which is a form of intimacy. His photographs are simple and perfectly timed, capturing the city with a wink that makes you feel like you’re in on the joke.

If Paris can sometimes take itself too seriously, Erwitt punctures the myth just enough to make it lovable again.

7) Sarah Moon

Sarah Moon photographs Paris as memory. Not the city as it is, but the city as it stays with you. Soft focus, atmosphere, time, that dreamlike feeling you get when you try to describe Paris to someone who has never been here.

Ending with Moon lets the whole arc land where most Paris love affairs eventually land. Not in a checklist. In a mood.

If you have a favorite Paris photograph, hit reply and send it to me. I want to see the version of the city you fell for.

FRENCH SONG OF THE WEEK
Charles Trenet - Les oiseaux de Paris

To tie in with this week’s vintage theme, I’ve chosen a classic that feels like it was pulled straight from a black and white film.

"Les Oiseaux de Paris" is a buoyant, archival piece of Paris history. I love this specific version because the vintage footage captures that 1930s energy. It’s the perfect musical companion to the photographers we explored today.