Taking photographs in Montmartre

Practicing with my camera last spring in Brooklyn (photo by Cory Stambler)Today I went out to take pictures. I have a beautiful old camera that I’m still learning how to use, and, having spent the morning inside while plumbers fixed a leak in my bathroom sink, I had a free afternoon, so I took the metro up to Montmartre. I had never been to that area of Paris before, nor did I know much about it, except that it was a neighborhood for artists about a century ago, and that it features the only funicular in Paris. A friend had told me that west of Sacre-Cœur, Montmartre is very touristy, so I loaded a new roll of film into my camera and headed northeast.

I got out at Château Rouge and walked in the opposite direction of the sign pointing towards Sacre-Cœur, into a sort of ramshackle street market. The neighborhood, I realized, is mostly West Indian—a few stores had Haïti in their names—and the produce booths sold wrinkled little peppers (red or light green) and large brown root-ish vegetables (or fruits? starches?) that I’ve seen before only at ethnic produce markets in Belleville, another area with a large immigrant population. There were men selling roasted corn in the streets, and shops selling African fabrics. This still being Paris, there were also bakeries and tabacs, which sell cigarettes and phone cards and have little bars inside. I took a few photos of people on the street, but I always feel a bit uncomfortable about doing that: what if they notice? Should I ask first? If I do, will they pose unnaturally? And how do I choose what I want to photograph, anyway? I noticed that I was drawn to the unfamiliar—corn sellers, a young black woman in an African-print dress and turban—and that made me a bit uneasy. The whole idea of taking a photo of something foreign seemed both voyeuristic (which I suppose photography always is, to an extent) and like an expression of power over a subject, as though the taken photograph takes something from whoever is in it. I was too nervous, or uneasy, to actually take many of the photographs I had considered. On a quieter corner, though, I asked one of the men selling roasted corn from a shopping cart if i could take his picture. He happily agreed, and posed holding an ear of corn.

Location