Reportage street art photos of happy smiling people enjoying a visit to the the Louvre Paris by photographer Paul E Williams
Smile – The Louvre A Reportage Photo Series.
Smile is an ongoing series of reportage street photos that I have been working on for 15 years or so. When photographing popular tourist sites I used to spend ages waiting for the visitors to have their photo taken, in front of what I was waiting to photograph. I therefore spent a lot of time watching people and how they changed their persona when being photographed. As my fascination grew I started to photograph the people instead of the places and the Smile series of photos was born.
See More Photos From The Smile People Photo Art Series
Reportage Street Photos
I have always found it difficult photographing people in the street. It feels like you are encroaching on private moments and stealing them. This though is probably the point of Street photography and at the root of its power.
Reportage is a fluid genre of photography where classical rules of lighting and composition go out of the window. Reportage street photography is about recording an image that lasts for a split second which then disappears forever. If you have trained your eye well you will compose the photo well by instinct, but its contents are more important that academic considerations.
When all is going well on a reportage shoot I go into auto mode and feel like I am watching myself taking photos. I try stop my conscious mind intervening in the process by enjoying watching myself discover the photos. This usually means that when I look at the photos after a shoot I am almost seeing them for the first time. Maybe thats the real buzz of street photography.
Smile Reportage Street Photos
Smile is an exploration of how people see and project themselves. The photos capture the moment when a person is acting out a rehearsed image of the way they want the world to see them. Quite often a person can look miserable before and after a selfie or having their photo taken. For a split second in front of the camera they suddenly become someone else and almost always smile.
I hope you enjoy the images and want to see more from the Smile series of photos.
About The Louvre Paris
The Louvre Paris is both a landmark building and one of the worlds great museums. Originally built as a the louvre Royal Palace by Phillip originally built in the late 12th to 13th, today all of the medieval castle is buried under a huge Renaissance and Baroque building.
The Louvre museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. The collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces.
Today The Musée du Louvre contains more than 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments with more than 60,600 square metres (652,000 sq ft) dedicated to the permanent collection. The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objets d’art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds.