Term: Issue 15: Paris
Explore all pages categorised under the heading Issue 15: Paris below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
AI CAN
In this interview, Panorama’s Director, Matthew Webb, speaks with noted illustrator Allen Shaw about AI and his new collaborative Short Film AI CAN.
The Other Paris
Every generation thinks it discovers sex and Paris. My 1970s discovery occurred with a Greek anti-hero in an intimate, inexpensive, crumbling Île Saint-Louis hotel. Paris...
Désolée, Monsieur
“Maurice Groenberg? Je suis désolée, monsieur.” “Madame, s’il vous plaît. I’m certain my father lived here from 1924 to 1942. He was a well-known pianist,...
Le Petite Voyeur
In Montmartre, near the place de Tertre, in the corner of a two-room flat, little Sébastien laid on his pallet of blankets next to Peter,...
Looking for Colour in the Cool Grey City
In October 2019, I could finally afford to visit the city of my youthful dreams. As a Japanese American teenager in the late 1950s, I...
Remembering Shay Youngblood
In January 2023, I had the honour of being invited to participate in the inaugural Freedom Writers Retreat for Black Women Writers at Black-owned boutique...
Visible and Invisible in Paris: A Reflection on Place, Identity, and Belonging
Travel entrepreneur Dawn S. Booker offers a refreshing, clear-eyed alternative to romanticised accounts by Black American travellers and expats in Paris. Booker, who teaches annually...
Whose Vacation Is This Anyway?
Joy Harris’s “Whose Vacation is this Anyway?” explores generational and cultural differences in travel expectations when she takes her two teenage nieces to Paris in...
A Sharecropper’s Daughter Goes to Paris
This powerful essay by Lydia Nayo, written decades before anyone imagined the Black Travel Movement, chronicles her journey from utilitarian, necessity-driven travel rooted in her...
Too Legit
Carol McGruder’s “Too Legit” explores Black American expatriate life in 1990s Paris, examining spontaneous networks of solidarity between touring African American performers and Black women...
Why Paris?
Acclaimed visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet, as well as the first Black American woman to receive an MFA degree from Yale, Barbara Chase-Riboud has...
Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure Partnership
Panorama is excited to partner with Elaine Lee, editor of the groundbreaking anthology Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure (1997), which...
From Deathstyle to Joie de Vivre: My Parisian Transformation
The brother’s passport pages were so crammed with stamps that accordion extensions bulged the back cover. He’d had to renew his passport two years early...
Revolution, Interrupted: Richard Wright’s Parisian Dissent & Death Keenan Norris
This excerpt from “Death in Paris (1960),” which appears in Keenan Norris’s Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, revisits the final years of Richard...
Brown Girl in Paris: Notes from a Non-Expat Life
American/Canadian N.A. Narayan’s frank, first-person account of living on her own in Paris for the last 7 years after a job opportunity in Burundi fell...
Black Girl in Paris
Paris. September 1986. Early morning. She is lying on her back in a hard little bed with her eyes closed, dreaming in French. Langston was...
John Singer Sargent in Paris: The Limits of Liminality
The transformative exhibition John Singer Sargent in Paris at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (27 April-3 August 2025) demonstrates Sargent’s dramatic...
The Genesis Exhibition by Do Ho Suh
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk The House, Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG 1 May 2025 – 19 October 2025, ‘Walk The House’,...
Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun
Edward Burra (1905-1976) and Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988), 13 June – 19 October 2025, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. Two for the price of one,...
My City Can Heal Water Violin, Water Wings
Paris, a metropole of histories and artistry, has long been a muse for writers who navigate its lambent streets and fevered dawns: Zola; Balzac; The...
ALL OF THE ABOVE
You can always go back to Paris. Planes and trains to get you there. Choose spring. By far the best. You can stay a week...
Life at 125th of a Second
I watch your ballet, paint brush in right hand, wingspan of an eagle. Steel struts a geometry of light and shadow. Smoke from your Gitane...
Saint Denis of Migraines, be with us as we lose our way
Beheaded in Paris, you continued to preach, walking six miles before dropping your crown. Keep us upright as we lumber blindly from bed, walk on...
Pillars
let me take you upon me oh life take you that place red-stained and glorious upon me red-stained no shadows I attest oh life and...
Eva-a Haibun
I felt you first, in Place Trocadero—a whisper? or premonition in June, the Tour de France raced past our window and your father raced to...
The Double Espresso Tastes of Paris
The double espresso tastes of Paris. Sounds like the bistro downstairs from our twenty years ago apartment in the sixteenth in the early dawning hours...
Departed
The Gare de Lyon is the place, if you’re going to miss a train, to miss it. If there is a reason to miss it,...
Birthday in Père Lachaise
Godard-grey December twilight pilgrim-pressed gum blobs on the nearest tree to Jim Morrison, his barricaded grave. Still? The black and white grave cat doesn’t care....
Bending Time
I’ve outgrown the person I use to be, clutched by pearls of propriety, society, tucked into a pocket of politeness, venturing only when partnered, or...
When Time Broke Down
At first, there were crackles—distant yet drawing near. Then, commotion. People dashed down alleys. An ashen waiter closed the blinds, told us to be quiet.
Spring Pilgrimage to Père Lachaise
The first day of spring lures me, pilgrim-silent, toward Père Lachaise, trailing echoes in stone. To the world, a cemetery: cracked saints, tourist sighs. To...
#prayforsaintdenis [an ode to the banlieue after 13 November*]
Pray for the tongue-tied sons of immigrants. For the kinky-haired boys who are not Charlie* whose last names and ninety-three codes* are red flags on...
Nina Smoked it up along the Seine
The lures from the catfishers spin away on down the bank where the waterlogged Carolina pines rot from the inside, then the knife is brandished...
Gabrielle
It is difficult to tell what happened in that room for all we have is his lens of your face: serene, content grateful. But I...
Flight 664—PDX to CDG
I never actually slept, legs folded like a screen over 19B and C. my head on your lap and your arm on me like that...
White Knights—Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon 50 Years On
The Mekong Delta wetlands were grey, dotted with glinting roofs and petrified boats, rivers winding every which way like a gigantic drip painting. The city...
We Threw Her in the Seine
My limbs were feather-light, hands and feet buoyant, and my Sharpie-drawn makeup refused to budge. I was made to drown. Toilet paper rolls supported my...
Vous sentez le jasmin: Paris in the Soul
Who is ever ready for Paris? We’re all fools when we arrive. If we don’t know that about ourselves already, Paris is happy to teach...
The Kindness of Strangers
I was 20 years old and headed overseas for a six-month study abroad experience. Of course, there were complications—it was my senior year in college,...
The Day Before We Saw Pompeii
One weekend in late September of my senior year of college, my classmate Riley and I took an overnight bus from our school in Perugia...
Paris with My Father
After my long wait at Charles de Gaulle airport, where the joyful reunions and towering luggage of African families bottlenecked the exits; after the train...
A Cravat and a Handful of Mary Medals
I hadn’t picked up Tin Ujević—the famous Croatian poet—in years. But the week before I left for Paris, I pulled weeds from the stone chapel...
A Beautiful Village
The first time I visited Europe, I was travelling with my 12-year-old son, Nick. My husband had died six years earlier, and I wanted to...
People Not Like Us
When we arrive at the Airbnb on Rue des Rosiers, we’re a half-bottle of wine deep, drunk from paper cups in the back carriage of...
Paris Syndrome: Pari Shōkōgun
Anything that can be loved can break one’s heart. Paris can be loved, but my wife cried on her first day in the city. In...
P. Burgos Street, Makati, Manila
The street has one of those mad people who sometimes shouts incoherently. She’s an old woman. More ancient than her years. Some of the tourists...
Consider the Trees
I’m in the middle of the woods… I ride out unpredictable beats. Spasm songs. I look up to the web of stems, watch them dance...
Where is the River?
I never leave Paris without having the sense of a missed opportunity. Not because I didn’t go to the coolest or oldest or weirdest bistro...
The Girl No One Knew
It was 1975, in Irkutsk—a quiet Siberian city wrapped in the concrete hush of the Soviet era. My grandmother and I walked through her friend...
Studying French as a Chinese American Woman
In Avignon, hungry and desperately wanting lunch, I wandered into a bakery. Like any customer, I went up to the counter and ordered a sandwich,...
Easter in Yamate
The sight greeting me as I walked out of the condo in Futakotamagawa in Tokyo at 7am on Easter Sunday felt auspicious. There was no...
A Strange Gift
He came home from work the other day carrying, apart from his usual laptop bag, a gift box about the size of a pop-up toaster....
A Bloom in the Dark
Just north of Paris, where I’d moved with my husband Ben a year earlier, the French national football team was playing Germany at the Stade...
Invasive Species
But enough about dead people. Don’t worry, I get it. You come to Paris and you want something fun, something colourful, not a pack of...
Graveside Kiss
Yolanda’s parents realised from the time she was born that she was not going to be like her sister Natasha. Internally, there was a partial...
Magasin d’âmes
On my umpteenth visit to Docteur Arnaud – his many reassurances notwithstanding – he joked to me about a possibility. I was desperate. ‘Well, they’re...
notes concerning the arc de triomphe roundabout
“Buckle up. We’re here.” I turn around to check on Diego and Mollie in the backseat. Diego is running a rosary through his fingers. Mollie...
The Sleepwalker's Paris
I wake up every morning to things that shouldn’t be there. This morning it’s a metro ticket for Line 15. There is no Line 15....
The Colour of Windex and Mouthwash
The island was hard to get to. It took a redeye flight to Miami, then a tiny plane with absurdly good service, where I was...
The City of Love Does It Again
Pam and I had often talked about having a girls’ weekend in Paris. The idea started at art school thirty years ago when we first...
Egg Salad and Other Nudities
It wasn’t the nudity that surprised me. It was the egg salad. I had braced myself for the bodies — sagging, swinging, sun-dappled — but...
OH HEMINGWAY!
Equal parts jet-lagged and hungover, I woke up the next morning with a face full of sunlight, and an ear full of snores—emanating from my...
Caillebotte: The Floor Scrapers
The impulse to fly came to Moshe as he prepared to leave the house on the morning of his wife’s funeral. He had no will...
The Art of the Hammock
Sometimes, that Adirondack Lake or mountain hike are out of reach because of responsibility or money. Sometimes a walk or our backyards will tide us...
For the Birds
If numbers were power, chickens would rule the animal kingdom. With over 35 billion of them roaming Earth, the population of Gallus domesticus outnumbers humans...
The Environmental Community
Inspired by the Twyford Down protests of thirty years ago, in which a tribe lived on the wildness they sought to protect, Pens of the...
Issue 15: Paris
Paris has long been the site of opulence, resistance, rebellion, and style. It has inspired great writing and writers, philosophy and philosophers. In this collection,...
Paris: City of Monuments
We retraced old haunts, ate ice cream, dined on the Eiffel Tower, joined the crowds at Montmartre. It was the first time we had paid...