Hidden Faces in Paris

When I moved to Brussels, I shipped various things from my home in Singapore. This included my queen-size bed (mattress and pillows included), a made-in-France cast iron pot (that got to travel around the world a bit) and a few pairs of stilettos (in which I struggle to walk on cobblestone streets).

Some of the more reasonable things that I did bring with me to Belgium were my books. Amongst which was this 2.5kg giant of a book titled “The Art of Looking Sideways” by Alan Fletcher (okay, perhaps it wasn’t quite necessary to include this in the shipment).

I don’t think that I’ve read more than 20 pages of this 534-page heavyweight since I bought it a few years ago. I flipped through it recently. A few small words in Italic, perched on the side of a page, caught my eye as I thumbed through the pages:

“How many ‘faces’ lie hidden waiting for the time when curious eyes will find them in their secret places. In the heart of a leaf or the bark of a tree. In a frozen pond or the turning sea. In the twist of a chair or the look of a key or in the shriveled skin of an elephant’s knee..” — Irwin Dermer

I found this quote to be quite charming and was inspired to sieve through the thousands of unnamed, unedited photos that I’ve taken in recent months. I was looking for something poetic. Something that would resonate in a similar way as the Irwin Dermer quote.Then I found these photos that I took in Paris in March 2011.

Faces that we pass on the street every day. Faces that make us stop in our footsteps. Faces that strike our imagination.