Paris | Photography Focus – Les Jardins et les chaises

Paris may not be the greenest of cities in the world, but there is something intrinsically Parisian about the parks and gardens which shape it. With their tightly trimmed box hedges and carefully manicured trees, their gravelly, sandy ground and lack of lawns (perfect for a game of  pétanque or boules with a few amis) and with their long wide promenades punctuated by lone statues and cluttered with strolling well-dressed flaneurs with their equally quaffed dogs, the parks of Paris are to me the heart and soul of the city, representing the ordered formality of the Haussmann planned boulevards, reflecting the grandeur of the more built up areas of the city, and providing much needed space for the residents of the city to collectively let their hair down.

But more than the sandy paths, the clipped hedges and the boules, the randomly collected green metal chairs are for me the symbol of Paris. Rather than, or sometimes as well as the benches which line the parks, Parisian gardens are always full of scattered chairs, some angled at a steep incline to allow the sitter to langour in the sunshine, and others more upright and formal, but none of them attached to the ground so that, at any one time, you can find them in a diverse array of compositions. So characteristic are these chairs of the gardens of Paris that I have made them the focus of my photographic exploration of the Paris gardens which we were strolling through between our various trips to art galleries, photos which also aptly reflect the wonderful array of autumn colours which burned brightly in Paris despite the overcast weather and the very cold winter temperatures. Enjoy!

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