See Paris through the eyes of Dennis Wile, one of the region's most celebrated photographers...

Eiffel Tower (Paris, 1994)
This photograph was made from a vantage point just east of the Palais de Chaillot. For many years, I had considered such monuments as unacceptable subject matter for the serious photographer, my feeling being that they became, paradoxically, less visible the more they were photographed--a result of the over-familiarity created from being shown in so many photographs. Later, I found that these faded subjects were refreshed when I juxtaposed them with other, often disparate, elements, or showed them in an unexpected manner. Since this discovery, using the above ideas, I went on to make other images that also included the Eiffel Tower. Recently, a friend reminded me of the filmmaker Francois Truffaut's similar use of this technique in the title sequence of The 400 Blows.

"During the last forty years, I have led parallel lives as a street photographer and a portraitist. Though I am known primarily for my portraits, I began my photographic work in the avenues and neighborhoods in and around Marseilles. From these beginnings in the south of France, and alongside my portrait work, I have continued to photograph the street in many places throughout the world.

The art of photography is my passion, and the means by which I create my vision of the world. Each art form possesses specific qualities from which its inherent charm derives. Photography's charm resides in its near perfect rendering of particular moments, creating the illusion of stopping time--in effect achieving the impossible. The spell that a photograph casts on us comes from the feeling that, by some magic, the limits of the possible have been exceeded. It is this spell that captivates me.