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The Cat in the Paris Antique Shop Window
Inventing a potentially new genre of the medium with Parisians of the feline persuasion
I’ve pioneered a new genre of photography — or at least I like to pretend I have. It’s called break photography, and it’s a subcategory of street photography in which one captures unprompted moments in the street.
So what distinguishes this budding new activity from the usual street variety? In short, break photography consists of photos taken during a break from work. You can only take a break photo if you’re taking a break.
It’s basically the KitKat of photography, if you get my drift.
On most days during the work week, I would head outside around 3 p.m. Walking the streets of Paris’ 17th arrondissement, I would pass six-storey art nouveau buildings built at the start of the twentieth century, under a leafy canopy packed to the rafters with cafe tables, and around an old cathedral before making my way towards a Franprix minimart.
Whilst I’m doing all this as a pretext to satisfy my unsustainable Diet Coke addiction, along the way, I would often get the chance to snap a photo or two. That’s because a little further up the road, there’s an antique store with a particular item on display: a little purring furball.
