Travelling to Paris?

Book into a Photographer’s Delight 

the Photography Themed Hôtel Déclic

By Steve Meltzer © 2017

I was planning a trip to Paris this spring for the publication of a book of my photographs and I was surfing the web looking accommodations when I came upon the Hôtel Déclic; a hotel that turns out to be a photographer’s wonderland dream wrapped up in elegant 4 star luxury. Crammed full of cameras and imagery Déclic was almost too good to be true. Even its name echoed its photographic ambiance; “déclic” is slang for a camera shutter release which is French « le déclencheur».

The Contact Sheet Suite

Checking it out, I discovered that the Hôtel Déclic was the creation of designer Sandrine Alouf of the company “Groupe Maranatha.” Alouf's vision was to create a unique hotel that surrounds its guests in a sumptuous photographic environment of images, nostalgia and deluxe furnishings. The hotel is located in Montmartre one of the city’s most romantic “quartiers.” Since the late 19^th century it has been known for its art and the artists who resided there; which includes everyone from Matisse to Picasso. As well as art this charming 18th arrondisement neighborhood exudes romance. Sensuality is in the air and Montmartre has been the setting for films like “Can-Can”, “Moulin Rouge” and “Amélie." The hotel itself is not too far from the famous “Folies Bergère.” 

The Photo Booth Room

From the street the hotel’s rather plain exterior belies the nearly hallucinogenic universe within. Entering the hotel you walk down corridors lined with cameras and hundreds of images. Checking in you discover rooms with names like the Reflex, the Contact Sheet and the Selfie. In fact all 18 rooms and 9 suites at Déclic are named for different photographic themes and decorated accordingly; often with tongue deeply in cheek. For a photographer it’s the perfect place to end a day after metro-schlepping across Paris taking photos.

The Reflex Room

In the Reflex Room for example you can stretch out on a bed shaped like a vintage interchangeable lens camera while in the Black & White room your bed’s headboard is a giant screen that projects a show of “retro” B/W images taken by anonymous photographers. As Sandrine Alouf charmingly puts it, “it captures the beauty of the art of photography, the taste of the image, and the joy of snapping”. It’s a room ready made for dreaming in black and white.

The Darkroom Suite 

Hotel Déclic blends sensuality and romance and it is nowhere more evident than in the “Darkroom Suite” (which is also known as the “Sexy Noire Suite.”) This room’s darkroom theme includes overhead ‘safelight’ illumination which will bring back fond memories to any analog era photographers. Having worked in a photo lab for 30 years myself I must say that this is the most deluxe darkroom I’ve ever been in. However the hotel frowns on actual darkroom work in suite as yellow fixer stains are impossible to get out of bed sheets and towels.

The Paparazzi Suite

Red is the color of passion and it dominates several rooms like the lusciously intense red décor of the “Paparazzi” suite. Fit for a visiting celebrity-- trying to avoid paparazzi-- it features a red carpet with a Hollywood gold star that leads to a sleek four poster bed. Looking up while in bed guests come face to face with a satiric pack of paparazzi armed with cameras staring down at them.

There’s also a "photo shoot" room for guests who want to sharpen their studio skills and the photographer Thierry Hugo is available through the hotel for classes and for private photo tours around the city.

The  Photo Studio Suite

Hôtel Déclic is an amazing place to stay. Comfort and luxury with prices that are quite in line with most 4 star Paris hotels (129-499€). You can find out more about Hôtel Déclic in my expanded article at

http://www.shutterbug.com/content/book-your-next-vacation-hotel-declic-fantastic-photography-themed-hotel-paris#adRmL3WECo84mDZb.97

For reservations or more information contact the hotel directly at  

http://declichotel.com/en/contact.html

(All photos abaca press courtesy Hôtel Déclic)   

Souvenirs d’ombre et lumière

Souvenirs d’ombre et lumière 

--Memories of shadow and light--

 photographies de Steve Meltzer 

Je suis blasé, fatigué de mes photographies, épuisé par ces moments décisifs, leurs couleurs vives et leur insistance sur la vérité. Leurs détails, et leurs respects méticuleux du monde réel émoussent mon imagination, tel un rasoir qui tranche à travers mes yeux. Tout… a été révélé et rien.

Photographies à la recherche de la perfection - nus gracieux, insectes monstrueux, palmiers, plages, visages étrangers, champs de fleurs, couchers de soleil et jeux d’enfants  - ont toutes été des clichés bien avant mes prises de vue. Les «idées reçues» du visuel ont simplement servi à renforcer les attentes et les croyances des spectateurs sur un univers reconnu de la «beauté».

L’ennui qui m'a poussé à me risquer, à rompre avec mes méthodes établies et mes longues habitudes m’a fait réaliser ces images. Pour cela j’ai utilisé une lentille trou d’épingle (sans verre) sur mon appareil numérique. Cette «lentille» laisse passer la lumière à travers un minuscule trou. Non modifiée par l'optique du verre, la lumière tombe sur le sensor de l’appareil en laissant sur ces images sa signature.

En violant les règles de la netteté, de la couleur, et de la fidélité qui sont la norme dans la photographie moderne, ces images deviennent complexes. Elles racontent des histoires incomplètes dont le récit est mystérieux. Elles suggèrent, mais laissent le spectateur libre de son interprétation.

Ces souvenirs d’ombres et lumières sont des énigmes attractives qui séduisent l'œil et le leurrent, peut-être pour stimuler l'imagination.

I had grown tired of my photographs, exhausted by their decisive moments, their brilliant colors, and their insistence on “truth.” Their detail and their meticulous adherence to the real world dulled my imagination, like a razor slashed across my eyes. Everything was revealed and yet nothing was revealed.

Images in whose perfection--graceful nudes, monstrous insects, palm trees, beaches, foreign faces, fields of flowers, sunsets and children at play--were all clichés long before my shutter snapped. Visual “received wisdom” they served to reinforce the viewers’ expectations and beliefs about a knowable universe of “beauty.” 

Ennui drove me to risk, to break with long established methods and habits. I made these images with a glassless “pinhole lens” on my camera. The “lens” passes light unmodified onto the camera sensor leaving these images as its signature.

By violating the rules of the norm --sharpness, color and fidelity--these images become difficult. They are incomplete stories whose narratives are mysterious. They suggest but do not indicate. They are memories of light and shadow, enigmas that seduce the eye and luring it in perhaps stir the imagination.

Sud de France 4.5: All Dat Jazz

My relationship with jazz has been a sometime thing. Growing up in New York I’d take the subway home after late night dates and there’d always be some musicians on the trains. Slouched over their bass cases and trombone bags, tapping their feet to the rhythm of the car wheels, they were going back up to Harlem in the wee hours of the morning. 

Tired and drained after a gig at some midtown hotel dining room or a club in the Village, their fingers  would unconsciously practice a riff on their unreachable fret boards and valves. 

These were the anonymous foot soldiers of jazz. Black musicians who loved to play but never made any real money at it. Every once in a while I’d recognize a face (say was that Miles?) but usually they were the sidemen who supported the big “names” and remained in their shadows. 

It was the late nineteen sixties and I was learning to play guitar. My heroes were another bunch of black musicians; blues men like Bukka White, Son House and Lighting Hopkins. With the anti-War movement and the rise of folk music, the action in Greenwich Village shifted from the Blue Note to the Café Wha and middle class white kids hauling banjos and washtub basses filled Washington Square pretending to be authentic Appalachians singers. 

I stayed in touch with jazz though because my best friend was a jazz enthusiast with a huge collection of vinyl LPs. Pretty regularly I'd get a call to come over and listen to some new record he had just gotten. Or we'd get together and hang out in a tiny Easy Village jazz club. By now I was performing in a folk band made up of college kids and I too was pretending to be a country boy. It didn’t last, there was this war on called Viet Nam and I had to move on leaving the band and New York behind. 

1967 rolled in and I found myself in San Francisco in the heat of the "Summer of Love. It wasn’t the sex, drugs and rock and roll thing the media made it out to be. Instead it was a sad, desperate time with lost kids from places like Topeka, St. Louis or Dallas, running away from the stifling world of Middle America hoping to find something; hoping to find anything, really.

Rock was the theme music of those days  but jazz held on. Groups like Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and performers like Leon Redbone were rooted in the jazz of the 1920s and musicians like Charles Lloyd with his big old Afro and color splashed batik shirts brought jazz to a new, “hip,” young audience. Jazz stayed very much alive although undervalued and sidelined.

After a year in San Francisco I headed north and for the next couple of decades I was the photographer for Seattle Center, the city's performing arts facility. I shot hundreds of concerts including the small number of jazz performances that were included in the big Labor Day Bumbershoot Arts Festival.

Usually presented in the Center's smaller venues, it meant that I got to meet and hear artists like Ray Charles, Marian McFarland, Buddy Guy and Etta James, in intimate rooms and halls.

In America today the audience for jazz has been aging while here in France it seems the jazz scene is healthy and the audience is young. 

For example, within a few weeks of arriving we were invited to a jazz “house party” in a private house in a nearby, very small village. For 8 Euros you got a glass of wine and some food and then sat down in the living room for an evening of live jazz performed by a local group. 

Pezenas is a renaissance age village in the South of France.

Then other day we were having a meeting with the owner of the house we are hoping to buy when out of the blue he turned to me and said, “I do hope you like jazz.” 

It turns out that Pézenas, the next town to ours, is a hotbed of music. The town’s old train station has been remodeled into a theater and there's a schedule of all sorts of music and art performances (and lots of jazz) throughout the year. 

And for a town of only 7500 people what’s even more surprising is its lively and active music club scene. 

Typical of what I mean is this notice I found in the local paper this morning.

Son du Swing

“At Club Butel (Pézenas) at 20:00. 18 December 2010. Le Son du Swing a collective of musicians based in Southern France who share a common passion for ‘jazz manouche’ or ‘Gypsy Jazz’. The line-up of the group is inspired by and celebrates the 'Quintet du Hot club de France'."  

The thought of all this jazz so close to my new home is heartwarming. In a way for me, it honors the legacy of those hard working musicians I shared all those late night subways with so long time ago. Men and women whose lives were all about all dat jazz.

And, of course, there's always Django.