Week of 19 October 2025.
Happy Sunday! I’ve finally recovered from a busy 6 days in Paris for the Salon de la Photo expo — making new photog friends, meeting French movie stars, wilding in a new neighborhood, and reconnecting with a beloved city.
Discovering the 19ème
Audrey Tatou et vivre pour soi-même
Geeking out with Ricoh GR
1. Discovering the 19ème
I’ve been to Paris many times over the years and had somehow never made it to the 19th Arrondissement neighborhood, where I stayed this time for Salon de la Photo. It was at the Grande Halle in La Villette — an expansive forested park area that houses various art, commercial, recreational, and events spaces with a lovely canal running through it. It is a pedestrian and garden and art-lovers paradise, and my forest witch side was in its bliss in the strange lush industrial architecture, gardens, and odd paths. I even found a record player spinning silently under the trees and a hall of mirrors.
The 19ème is on the outskirts of the city and a bit scrappier, open, and less manicured than the more-traveled and iconic dense city center. It felt very local and I loved it’s sauvage and hidden pockets — like the La Gare-Le Gore jazz club in an old train station and walkable parts of the abandoned train tracks La Petite Ceinture.
There was room to breathe and stroll along the canal and find my favorite new brewery in Paris at La Paname. Delightful to discover a new side of the city.
2. Audrey Tatou et vivre pour soi-même
I went to see the fabulous actress and (yes!) photographer Audrey Tatou.
Yes, I finally sat across from Amèlie. She had a recent exhibition in Arles and it was wonderful to get to know her as an artist. She talked about self-portraits as a way to claim your identity and truly live as/for yourself, taking street photos of strangers around the world, and a decades-long project of photographing journalists and others typically behind camera.
Here’s a great interview with her on this topic.
She also talked about her recent impulse, after decades of wanting artistic privacy, to go public with it all:
“Now I’m trying to make everything exist. […] “it was because there was no other option. I wanted to show them, no matter where, it could have been on a field in the middle of nowhere. I wanted them to be out.”
3. Geeking out with Ricoh GR & new friends
The main reason I headed to Paris was to connect with folks from Ricoh Imaging Europe at Salon de la Photo as I am a judge for their GR Photo Festival 2025 and they had a large booth at the huge photo & video event that I’d never been to — it all seemed like a lot of fun.
I had a great time at the Salon, meeting Ricoh staff and other ambassadors, going on a photowalk, meeting up with new friends / dear old friends / the delightful Cedric, going to demos and talks, and fondling all manner of cameras and Hahnemühle paper samples and photobooks.
The GR space had some great speakers and featured photos and quotes by other photoGRaphers, including me:
GR IV gives me the freedom to work straight out of the camera. I set it, forget it, and no longer edit. The lens, the power, and the customization free me to focus on my subjects and artistic vision.
(It was fun to see this translated into French!)
Here’s a little video I made of the event:
I also saw Nouvelle Vague (2025) at a movie theater. It was wonderful and really got me thinking. I may need to write about that this week.
Thanks for reading and joining me on your weekend!
xo
JILL.DESIGN 
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