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An innocent photo walk in a lovely town in the South of France turns into a treasure hunt for exotic windows and garage doors 🙂
For those unfamiliar with Montpellier (France, not Vermont) it is an elegant city located close to the Mediterranean coast and home to a vast number of elegant stone buildings and manucured gardens.
It is a modern town, as modern as they come in France, but one with deep roots and a tremendous academic heritage, particularly in the field of medicine. It’s medical school still hosts some of the Europe’s best research labs and courses.
It’s also my birth place 🙂 though I never lived there until Uni, and without a doubt my favourite town in France.
But this post is not about elegance, heritage, architecture or prestigious academic achievement.
Immediately surrounding the rich center lies a flourish of less posh neighbourhoods teeming with life and interesting streets.
While we French aren’t allow to photograph humans, we are still (so far) allowed to photograph the what humans make. And what started like a quick digestive walk in those areas, ended up revealing a treasure trove of photographic opportunity. I had to cut it short, having work to do. But this could have lasted a whole day.
A first, no particular pattern was visible in the various houses lining the small streets that saw me digesting a spicy burrito. But two soon emerged.
As gentrified as it has become, the area can still be … touchy … at night. So, barred doors and windows are the rule far more than the exception.
And, as in all old towns confronted with modern traffic, parking space is at a premium. So many garage owners have displayed some sort of warning to neighbours, asking them not to park in front of their doors. A sort of registration-based peeing on their parking territory, if you will.
As always, exhuberant variety makes me jump up and dow in appreciation. This display of creative chest-pounding was the theme of my afternoon, as the range of displays would have made my semiotician dad all topsy turvy 😉
This last – puzzling – one is a convenient segway into the other category of today’s post: barred doors and windows.
Here again, there was no uniformity to complain about and what I found even more interesting than the variety of bar shapes and motifs was the little decorations and arrangements present the bars.
A sort of reminder of the human brain’s love of contact and beauty, even in the face of aggression. Or simply of neglect, in other windows. Interesting in both cases.
That’s it. This post has no other purpose than to share the photos from an hour of walking about in an interesting area. This was refreshing for me. I tend to photograph differences between whatever place I’m visiting and my own neck of the woods. It’s what I live for, photographically. But this was right next door to my home and still very inspirational.
Now let’s just hope there isn’t another unfathomable law making photographs of registration plates on garage doors illegal. It wouldn’t surprise me, but here’s to hoping the obviously admirative nature of this post spares me the lash.
How about you? Did you like this? Care to share what doors and garages look like in your area? Or any other typical specificity 🙂
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