An American Sometimes In Paris

Portability and stealth—these are the advantages of taking pictures with an iPhone, says photographer Mina Carson.

Dozens of Carson’s color photographs of Paris are on display at the Center  through March 23. The pictures offer the equivalent of a vivid stroll through one of the world’s greatest cities—a stroll drawn from a week when Carson limped around Paris with the help of a cane. She used an iPhone, in part, because her usual digital single-lens-reflex camera was too heavy.

“The iPhone also forces me to focus on composition. I found to my surprise that composing with color is very important to me. Maybe it’s Paris—although my photographic heroes, Atget and Doisneau, shot black and white pictures of Paris that almost make one want to live in the olden days when the air smelled of pissoirs and Gauloises.”

An associate professor of history at OSU and a former Center Research Fellow, Carson first visited Paris during a college break in 1974, a period when Parisians “had no patience with American kids with backpacks—remember, that was the Watergate era when many U.S. students pasted Canadian flags on their luggage.”  Paris left her “overwhelmed and abashed. Twenty-five years later I discovered Paris as the great good place. Paris has changed, and I have changed. Paris is now truly an international city, with all the bads and goods that transformation entails.  .  . It is grand, breathtaking, yet somehow built for humans, on a human scale.”

Through the sly lens of the iPhone, Carson captures details of street life, café culture, moody light, the centrality of the Seine, flamboyant architecture, ubiquitous—and often playful—sculpture, and, of course, the general air of romance.

The exhibit, at 811 S.W. Jefferson, is free and open to the public weekdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For information call 541-737-2450.