Culture Shock

"A great photograph is an image that stops the endless flow of images"

Paris is like this great treasure chest, where the more you search through it, the more gems you find. I had the pleasure of stumbling upon one of those last week, a temporary exhibit at the Petit Palais. For background knowledge, the Petit and Grand Palais function as museums with several exhibitions a year - at the Grand Palais, there is currently a Monet exhibition, but the lines to get in are massive (I guess Monet was kind of popular or something), so the Petit Palais is a calmer alternative. They have an impressive permanent collection, but currently they have an exposé on a father-daughter pair of French photographers, called "100 photos de Pierre et Alexandra Boulat". Pierre's style was focused on black and white, capturing the beautiful in the ordinary. I was struck by several pieces:

While his daughter, Alexandra Boulat, focused on photo-journalism, with really powerful and relevant pictures usually focusing on crisis and need (mainly in other parts of the world more affected by things like war, poverty, disease), but also giving viewers a much needed wake up call:

To see the work of these people, so completely contradictory but sparking from the same need to capture something real, an image that treads through all of the constant motion of everyday life and finds that picture that is not simply a photograph but a memory, a moment - it was a good find in Paris.