PETER TURNLEY/PARIS-CALIFORNIA 12/4/25

Peter Turnley/Paris-California

This exhibition represents 50 years of photographs of the life of Paris, and a series of photographs made in 1975 for the California Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) documenting the working class and poor during a four-month road trip along the roads of every corner of this unique state.

While Paris and California may seem a world apart-the photographs presented in this exhibit represent the commonality and universality of a wide and profound spectrum of aspects and elements of the human heart and condition.

All images seen are part of two important new books, “Paris-Je t’aime-50 Years of Photographs” and “The Other California-1975”.

Paris-je t’aime

Being a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there.” ~ Sacha Guitry.

I have now lived in Paris for 50 years. I first arrived on a fall September day in 1975 at the age of 20. A very important platform of family values, ideas and beliefs regarding our “family of men and women”, regarding human equality, the beauty of diversity, empathy and compassion for those less fortunate than I, and a foundational belief that one should try to make the world a better place, were all part of the young man that first took a bus into Paris from Charles de Gaulle that first fall day.

But, from that first day in Paris, and for the following five decades, my life and my world were reborn. I became immediately passionate about the beauty of the French language and for first eight months in Paris, I refused to ever speak a word of English to learn as quickly as possible, and to become part of this new society and culture and allow me not only to see, but to feel all that was around me.

I believe none of us have invented the wheel. We are all part of an ever-evolving construction. Since first picking up a camera at the age of 16-I was enchanted by the photographs of Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson and so many other photographers that had employed photography to inform and impact change upon the hearts of anyone witnessing the world they were seeing.

Once in France, I sought out my heroes of French photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertesz, Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Josef Koudelka and many others. Most of these people were not only my mentors but became my friends. I always remember finding Robert Doisneau’s number in the phone book and cold calling him one day. I introduced myself on the phone and told him I didn’t want anything from him-I just wanted to be touched by the spirit of the person that had made his photographs. I went on to be his assistant for a period in the early 1980’s and was always touched as much by his personal humanity as by his photographs.

I have never tried to describe life in Paris. I have always been much more interested in feeling it and offering others the chance to feel it as well.

During my life in photography, I have documented most of the world’s important news stories and have traveled to over 90 countries. I have witnessed most of the wars in the world during this time, natural and man-made disasters, and major world socio-economic and geo-political change. I was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, Haiti, and much more.

I witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, Tiananmen Square uprising in China, and Nelson Mandela walking out of 27 years of incarceration.

Amid all this that has impacted profoundly my heart, there has been one constant-I have always returned to Paris, my adopted home which has been both a necessary, and essential balm for my soul.

Anyone that knows Paris well, knows that like all major metropolitan cities worldwide, there exists challenges, issues, and problems. But with that, and I have been visually attentive to all of this in my visual documentation of life in Paris-with all of that-Paris is also without any doubt the place in the world with the most spectacular art de vivre, beauty, elegance, grandeur, and a place where love and romance are lived with glory, and knowledge that with all of the world’s problems, family, friendship, sincerity, sensuality, and love, are our only true salvation.

I am proud of my origins in many ways, but I also can say without hesitation that one of the most moving and uplifting days of my life was the day I became a French citizen and France offered me French nationality.

I share with you here, a visual testament to all that Paris has offered me, and with these photographs, I am grateful to give back to the city and its’ people and visitors, my love.

Peter Turnley, Paris, March 2025

The Other California-1975 by Peter Turnley

This is a reportage of photographs I made nearly fifty years ago of people that I encountered across the state of California during almost four months of driving thousands of miles throughout and to every corner of that state.

The people shown in these images, mostly of working-class backgrounds, all opened their lives and welcomed a twenty-year-old man to make a portrait of a moment in their existence. For the past five decades I have lived with the painful knowledge that most of these images have never been seen by the public. I recently published a book to honor the people seen here and to offer everyone a chance to consider them as well as that moment in time and history.

Forty-seven years ago, when I was nineteen and finishing my sophomore year at the University of Michigan, I received a letter from a woman, Deanna Marquart, who worked for the California Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). She asked me if I would be willing to come to California for a commission to make a four-month road trip throughout the state to document the life of working- class Californians, and in particular, the most impoverished people in the third largest state of the United States.

The director and staff of the OEO at that time believed in the power of the photograph to show and to evoke the need for social change. They believed that strong, honest photographs could serve to inspire and energize the government employee too often distracted by a maze of paperwork and statistics, and to remind the general public of the need for an effective social assistance program.

Since I started making photographs at the age of sixteen, I had been not only inspired by people like the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson but many other photographers, too, including those who worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) one of the programs of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, developed during the Great Depression. The FSA photographers documented life in America with the intent of not only documenting a time in history; they envisioned photography as a means to affect change—and to draw attention to people whose voices were often not heard loudly, if ever.

I arrived in California in mid-May 1975 and was based in Sacramento, where I was given access to a government darkroom, but most of those four months, until the middle of August, I spent driving throughout the state.

In a small white Volkswagen, I was accompanied throughout that summer by my college sweetheart, Karen Gulliver, who was already an accomplished writer. I will always cherish memories of her presence with me throughout that extensive road trip and what that has always meant to me. I was given just enough expense money to cover gasoline, meals in diners, and the least expensive of California hotels. As I traversed this amazing state, more like a country than a state, with its remarkable diversity in population, geography, and ways of life, the whole experience became an important turning point in my life.

Having grown up in the Midwest, in Indiana and Michigan, I was not unfamiliar with rural America. But as a young man I was familiar only with the stereotypes of California—its beautiful coastline, surfers, and the images of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and San Francisco—and it was only during this trip that I became aware that California is the largest agricultural and rural state in the country.

During my travels, I spent much time in the San Joaquin Valley in places like South Dos Palos, Fresno, Bakersfield, Modesto, and in the farmlands in between.

I also spent a great deal of time in Oakland, Hunters Point, Bay View, and the Tenderloin of San Francisco, Watts in Los Angeles, San Diego, and the fields near Death Valley.

Among other subjects, I photographed many of the people who worked below minimum wage to put food on the tables of America.

For most of the past forty-seven years these photographs have lain dormant, seen by very few people. After my commission began, significant changes in the California Office of Economic Opportunity took place. The man who directed this assignment, Ed Villamore, resigned from thethe OEO in the middle of my four-month road trip. Before returning to Michigan from California, I recall leaving an extensive set of prints behind, but all these years later, my memory is hazy as to whether these photographs were exhibited in the State Capitol in Sacramento. So I have lived for more than forty years with no certainty of how my photographs were actually ever used by the OEO. Be that as it may, I am certain that these photographs are a document of an important moment in Californian, and American, history. I know they offer a sense of the texture and the emotions of the lives of the working class in the mid-1970s.

This book is a tribute to both that time and to the lives of the many people I encountered. The photographs speak for themselves and represent my belief and conviction that they must be seen.

Shortly after leaving California in the late summer of 1975, I was invited to dinner in New York by John Morris, a former photo editor of the New York Times, Life, and many other publications, and he encouraged me to show these photographs to the great American documentary photographer W. Eugene Smith. The evening that I met Smith, he took me aside after seeing these photographs and said quietly, “Peter, you have a very good heart and very good eyes. No one will ever hold your hand in this profession, but you can do this, and you should go out, and always follow your heart, and be a photographer.”

On the heels of that advice, I dropped out of college for a semester and moved to Paris, my adopted home since 1978, where almost daily I have photographed the life of the city.

In my life as a photographer I have traveled to more than ninety countries and have covered most of the important geopolitical news stories of the world. My photographs have graced the cover of Newsweek magazine forty-three times and have been published in the world’s most prestigious magazines and publications, and I have published seven books.

I have always felt that the photographs in this book are among the most important I have ever made—yet most have never been seen.

It is never too late to share a vision of the world; this book at last presents the opportunity to share moments of lives that deserve to be seen and considered.

Peter Turnley

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