Paris Overnight

The British Magnum photographer Mark Power was in Paris for the annual Paris Photo fair, having dinner out with some colleagues near the glass-domed Grand Palais, when news of the terror attacks started to trickle in the night of November 13th. The following morning, he says, “there was a silence hanging over the city”; he walked the streets, but not in his accustomed photographer role (his camera equipment was back home in England); in the afternoon, he took a Eurostar back home. “For the next forty-eight hours, I carried on with life much as normal,” he said. “But something was calling me back to Paris, and I knew I had to go. I began to formulate some kind of idea to try and make visual that awful silence.” Power returned to Paris last Tuesday evening and found Parisians “out in force once more”; he took these photographs early the next morning, when the streets and the attack sites, now covered in fading flower bouquets, were quiet once again.