This week I am in Tangier where I’m indulging in the Tangier Painting Holiday as a very niche and special gift to myself for my 40th birthday. I’ll have more to share when I return home, but in the meantime, this makes for another great opportunity to showcase a special Paris guide from two dear friends.
Blake and Lindsey Shorter are Charleston based photographers and adventurers. We’ve worked with them both in a variety of capacities (I hired Lindsey for her first job when she moved to Charleston!) and they’ve become great friends.
They’ve married their interests of travel, photography and writing with the launch of the collaborative project Extra Hands. I’ve watched them travel to Paris on and off for the last several years, and they always traffic through the city with a curious and engaged eye. I wanted to know where they go, and they were kind enough to share their list (abbreviated but still plenty long!) with A Small & Simple Thing readers.
I’ll let Blake tell you more about their partnership in his own words:
Lindsey and I both work as photographers, and I’ve always enjoyed writing — a few years after we married, we’d realized traveling had become part of the natural rhythm of our relationship. Every year we’d plan an ambitious, months-long trip for the summer, and spend the springtime in Charleston planning our itinerary. When we’d come home at summer’s end, we would reminisce on these trips through the winter, and start the process again. Eventually, traveling felt like part of our identity, and we’d started dreaming up some way to document and share the experiences we were having through images and storytelling. That idea became Extra Hands, a place for our collaborative work to live and an extension of our journeying— and then evolved over the past few years as we’ve published photo essays in travel publications and partnered with brands and clients to help tell their stories too.
Of the European cities we’ve visited, Paris is the place where we’ve spent the most time, long enough to make a few friends and eventually gain the confidence to take the metro someplace without using our phones for navigation. Still, Paris remains full of wonder: in the confluence of architecture and art and culture, a rhythm of life so attuned to the romance of simple things, to eating and drinking in celebratory ways, to companionship and camaraderie.
Here’s a meandering but abbreviated guide to our favorite city:
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