What Paris Actually Owes You

Last time I was in Paris—and it’s been long enough that the specific reasons have dissolved into irrelevance—I did the things you do in Paris. I won’t name them. You’ve seen the photos from someone else’s trip and they look exactly like mine.

Photographer Alex Brunet had a better idea. He met up with Kimbra—an American artist and model based in New York, someone he’d known for a couple of years—bought some beers, and barricaded them both in a Paris hotel room to shoot raw, unpretentious photographs for a fashion magazine. No monument. No filtered golden-hour light on a Seine bridge. Just a room, two people who know each other, and whatever happens when you stop performing the city.

There’s something right about that. Paris is aggressively mythologized to the point of self-parody—every tourist with a camera phone has made the same pilgrimage to the same tower for the same shot—and the mythology mostly just gets in the way. The souvenir hawkers under the Eiffel Tower have already killed whatever romance was supposed to be there. What survives is what happens behind closed doors, with cold beer and someone worth looking at. Next time I’m there, that’s the version I want.