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The last winter I spent in Paris was the coldest I've ever felt - it felt painful to leave the house, and even sitting still for too long at home made us begin to shiver. Maciek was experimenting with infrared photographs, and ended up taking a series of pictures in the Buttes Chaumont in the pitch black of winter nights for Vice. I styled the series with Bambou and Charlotte, which meant bringing all the clothes we'd sorted in huge bags to the park, as well as running around on the icy grass with battery boxes for the lights, struggling to stay upright and keep warm.
For the final picture, we wanted a group of girls running naked as if they were deers caught in the headlights. The six of us who did it in the end built up the nerve in a bar around the corner before, moving from picon beers to vodka drunk straight from the bottle in the vague hope that it would, if not warm us up, numb the cold. In the end it wasn't the cold that forced us to stop shooting, but a park keeper who came across us and attempted to march us all to the authorities. We desperately scooped up the rolls of film while rushing to get dressed, and then made a break for it all the way back to the bar we'd started off in, now giddy with the cold and adrenaline - and perhaps the vodka too.
After we'd warmed up enough we went home for tea sipped in front of the fire, and waited for our feet to regain feeling.
The first day that I moved to Paris last year, Maciek and I spotted a huge derelict house on the hill just below the Sacre Coeur as we walked around talking about taking romantic, dramatic, violent pictures on rooftops with smoke clouds and the constant danger of falling.
After we found a huge church with intricate scaffolding and ladders up one side near to the Gare de l'Est, we planned and proposed the shoot to Vice, and then spent the following weeks scaling the church wall at two in the morning and breaking into the abandoned building on the hill, stepping over dead pigeons, whispering in the bell tower, and setting alight thick black 'fire paste' on Maciek's dining table.
I styled the shoot with Charlotte, and we spent days walking around the press offices in the 3rd arr. looking over and over for blankets and sheets to drape around the models. These are the pictures as they appeared in the magazine:
And some of mine and Maciek's references:
When we had taken all of the pictures at the end of the month we knew the way up to the roof of the church pretty well, so climbed up one last time with a giant bottle of wine we'd taken from a bar to drink looking over Paris. After that we started to climb up onto rooftops whenever we saw scaffolding in the summer, to sit in the sun and look down at other rooftops. These are some of the pictures mostly taken by Arturo of us climbing around in the weeks when we were shooting:
