🇫🇷 💌 The Paris Love Letter #144

OUR WEEK IN PARIS
The Tuileries Walkabout & Museum Visit

The Jeu de Paume remains one of my favorite "smaller" museums in Paris. It is manageable, focused, and sits in one of the most beautiful corners of the city. I actually tried to book a ticket for the Martin Parr show earlier in the week, but it was completely sold out online. While it can be a bit of a hurdle to coordinate, I really appreciate that art exhibitions like this still draw such massive, enthusiastic crowds. It shows how much people still value these shared cultural moments.

When I finally made it inside, I found the exhibition to be an excellent celebration of Parr’s life and work. It is a comprehensive look at a photographer who saw the world exactly as it is, without the filters we usually try to apply to it.

After leaving the museum, I took advantage of the one truly sunny day we had this week. It was a wonderful treat. Wandering through the Tuileries in the winter is a completely different experience from navigating it in July. Without the summer crowds, the garden feels expansive and open, maybe even meditative.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon just wandering the paths and watching the light hit the statues. It was the perfect day to practice exactly what the Parr show suggests: being an observer rather than a consumer.

The Parr exhibition is at the Jeu de Paume through early May. If you are in town and want a break from the overwhelming scale of the Louvre, I highly recommend booking a ticket in advance. It is a brilliant, biting, and ultimately very human reflection of how we live now.

Linking You to Paris

➡️ 49 Paris Hotels as Gorgeous as the City Itself: Condé Nast Traveler rounds up 49 standout Paris hotels across styles, neighborhoods, and budgets, with quick notes on what each property is best for so you can match the stay to your trip.

➡️ Would you like to try the best restaurants in Paris?: Paris Secret offers a curated guide to the best restaurants, bars, and food trends in Paris for anyone looking for quick dining recommendations across the city.

➡️ 10 fascinating French museums — that are nowhere near Paris: The Times rounds up 10 fascinating museums across France that are nowhere near Paris, from major WWII memorials to châteaux and art collections worth a detour.

➡️ 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Paris: Bonjour Paris shares 10 surprising Paris facts and curiosities, from quirky museums and steampunk metro stations to rooftop beehives, hidden vineyards, and even a visitable sewer museum.

VISITING PARIS
Stop Collecting Paris

I spent Wednesday morning at the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuileries. The occasion was the Martin Parr exhibition, Global Warning. If you are not familiar with Parr, he is a British photographer who has spent fifty years documenting the absurdities of modern life with high-saturation flash and a very dry sense of humor.

Walking through the galleries was a refreshing, if slightly uncomfortable, reflection of my own complicated relationship with Paris tourism.

Parr does not photograph the "postcard" version of a city. He photographs the people standing in front of the postcard version. He captures the exhaustion of the queue, the aggressive consumption of the souvenir shop, and the strange, modern ritual of experiencing a monument primarily through a five-inch screen.

The exhibition text notes that Parr was an "amused observer" who acknowledged that he belonged fully to the world he documented. He was not standing on a pedestal looking down at the tourists. He was right there in the crowd, acknowledging his own role in the machine.

I felt that deeply. As someone who makes a living showing people this city, I am constantly navigating the line between helping people see Paris and helping them experience it.

The irony inside the gallery was a quiet study in human behavior. I noticed a real mix of approaches: some people were completely still, taking in each image, while others moved quickly from frame to frame with their smartphone cameras out. There were even a few visitors wandering through the rooms with their faces in their phones, seemingly somewhere else entirely.

It was a gentle reminder of the exact behaviors Parr captured with his lens. It is a fascinating thing to witness how easily we can be physically present in a place while our attention is focused somewhere else.

Parr once said, "I’m creating entertainment, which has a serious message if you want to read into it... I’m just showing them what they think they may know already."

What we often find is that the way we travel has become a frantic collection of trophies. We treat the city as a backdrop for a digital proof of purchase. We rush from one landmark to the next, checking boxes until we are too tired to actually feel the place we came to see.

It brings up a question I often ask on my Montmartre tours: What happens to a city or a neighborhood when it becomes famous for being authentic?

The exhibition calls Parr's work a form of "visual guerrilla warfare" against the glossy, smoothed-over images sold by the tourism industry. It suggests that in the rush for authenticity, it is easy to accidentally destroy the very thing we are looking for by turning it into a commodity.

So, what can be learned from Martin Parr about visiting Paris?

First, there is a lot of value in being amused by ourselves. There is no point in being a travel snob who looks down on people taking selfies. We are all part of the same ecosystem. But we can choose to be more conscious of the "why."

Second, there is a shift that happens when we move from consuming to looking. Consuming is a surface relationship, a trophy spouse of an experience that requires no integration or intimacy. Looking is about experiencing a place, noticing how we feel, and how it quietly changes us. It requires a certain amount of unproductive time.

I put my phone away at the exhibition, except for a few photos I took specifically to share here. Afterward, I walked out into the Tuileries Garden. It is winter, so the usual swarms of tourists were absent. It was quiet.

I sat on one of those iconic green chairs for a long time and just listened. I noticed the way the gravel sounds when people walk over it. I watched the way the winter light hits the statues and reflects off the ponds.

I considered that Paris does not reward the person who sees the most things. It rewards the person who notices the most details.

Paris is a living city, not a souvenir. It becomes much more interesting when the goal is no longer to collect it, but to simply let the city happen.

FRENCH SONG OF THE WEEK
Naomi Greene - T'es Beau

Naomi Greene is a Franco-American artist who brings a haunting, ethereal quality to the harp, an instrument we usually associate with the classical and the precious. In T'es Beau, she strips that away, blending her voice with a raw, indie-rock sensibility. It is a beautiful, moody track that feels like the perfect companion for a gray winter afternoon in Paris.