Mark 
Steps Through Silence: Rue du Chevalier de la Barre
There’s a strange magic to Montmartre when you allow yourself to drift, not as a tourist seeking landmarks, but as a soul seeking echoes. On this particular morning, the city was soaked. Paris breathed through the mist. And as I descended this forgotten stairway, I wasn’t thinking about the Eiffel Tower vanishing into cloud, I was thinking about footsteps.
Henri Cartier-Bresson spoke of the “decisive moment,” but what he captured, what I feel here, is the pregnant pause just before it. The anticipation. The tension. This photograph, my homage to his way of seeing, was taken not in pursuit, but in surrender. I wasn’t chasing beauty. I was letting the street find me.
The dérive, the drift, lets architecture, weather, and memory pull at your collar. I turned a corner and there it was: graffiti scrawled over walls that whispered youth and revolt, foliage hanging heavy with rain, and a staircase that felt like theatre. A stage between the past and the present. No actors. Just quiet. And yet, somehow, I knew a story had just happened, or was about to.
This is what Montmartre offers when you walk without an agenda: moments layered in decay, colour, silence, and resistance. The city becomes less a subject and more a collaborator. The wet cobbles speak in their language.
In that moment, I wasn’t photographing Paris, I was listening to it.
Join me on my Next trip to Paris
Image Details
A moody, rain-slicked stairway in Montmartre, Paris, leads the eye down to a quiet street framed by graffiti walls and ivy-draped stone. The distant Eiffel Tower disappears into the mist behind a pale apartment block with red shopfronts. Autumn leaves gather in wet corners, and the air feels hushed, just before or just after a story unfolds.
© Mark Stothard MA ARPS
