Photographer’s 50 Year Love Letter to Paris

Photographer Peter Turnley arrived in Paris in 1975 aged 20. Since then he has thrown himself into the City of Light, documenting its comings and goings on his trusty Leicas.

“While Paris is a large metropolitan city with problems that many big cities have, and some specific to Paris, it is without doubt the city in the world where one can see on a daily basis the most public expressions of love, romance, elegance, friendship, sensuality, and grace, in the world,” Turnley tells PetaPixel.

“It is a city that represents a multitude of tones of grey, making it a place where black and white photographs best express certain universal and timeless humanistic qualities.”

Turnley says he has documented Paris as much as any other photographer in the past 50 years. “I am proud to think that my photographs carry on the strong legacy of humanistic photography that has been expressed by many of my predecessors like Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Boubat, Brassai, Weiss, Stettner, and others. Most were not only my mentors, but also my close friends.”

Turnley, who has shot most of his photos on Leica M cameras — both analog and digital editions — says he is most interested in communicating what life in Paris feels like.

“I avoid communicating about photography as any form of formula,” he says. “What is most important is authenticity, emotion, and spontaneity. The great French photographer Robert Doisneau, whom I assisted in the early 1980s, once said to me, ‘Peter, description kills.’ Questions are always much more important than answers, in photography and in life.”

Turnley has worked for Newsweek, Harper’s, Stern, Paris Match, Geo, LIFE, National Geographic, among many others. He has worked all over the world and has witnessed most major stories of international geopolitical and historic significance in the last 40 years. He has both American and French nationality.

“During my life in photography, I have documented most of the world’s important news stories and have traveled to over 90 countries,” he says. “I have witnessed most of the wars in the world during this time, natural and man-made disasters, and major world socio-economic and geo-political change. I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, Haiti, and much more.”

“Amid all this that has profoundly impacted my heart, there has been one constant: I have always returned to Paris, my adopted home, which has been both a necessary and essential balm for my soul.”

Paris Je t’aime can be purchased by visiting Turnley’s website.

Image credits: Photographs by Peter Turnley