Photography
The three-kilometre-long exuberant Boulevard de Garavan, lined with fragrant trees and hanging from the cliffs, takes a contoured and panoramic route from Menton Old Town to the border with Italy at Pont Saint-Louis. .
Sylvain Jaffret was the architect of the Boulevard de Garavan, where the mountains meet the sea. Construction started in 1882, completed in 1888. The people of Menton soon nicknamed it the “Babylonian dream”. The Boulevard de Garavan continues to attract the world’s elite to its heavenly setting with mild winters
More photos: Architecture of the “Babylonian dream”: Boulevard de Garavan, Menton
Crowds and solitude: the calm at the end of the day in Menton on the French Riviera.
Photo of Eastbourne Pier as an exercise in style. I’m seeking to emulate the postcards of the French company Yvon, I received many of these sent by my Father while he was working at marine biology research stations in the 1960s. Yvon postcards then were dramatic colour or high gloss black and white, the image quality was far above that which could be achieved by holiday snapping. Yvon’s postcard France featured landscapes and architecture which fuelled my enthusiasm as a junior traveller as well as a schoolboy photographer shooting, developing and printing my own photographs well before I was a teenager.
Place Notre-Dame du Mont, Marseille
Cours Julien, Marseille
Six views of Marseille sixth arrondissement today.
Difficult to pin down what is créole architecture taste in La Réunion but it’s easy to recognise: there’s the preference for a three-window pattern and a building design based on square, the choice of colours is distinctive. Residences of the petits-blancs (white settlers) have more restrained colours and more architectural detail.
The gardens of Hell-Bourg are similarly diverse. Almost all flowering plants are imports; the tree ferns are imports that have become indigenous. There’s a striking absence of garden versions of plants used for agriculture, so I didn’t notice any flowering ginger, coffee or sugar cane.
More photos: Architecture & gardens of Hell-Bourg, Cirque de Salazie, Île de la Réunion
