Paris in 1981 was a city standing at a turning point. François Mitterrand had just been elected President of France, and his arrival in office signaled a shift — politically, economically, and physically — for one of the world’s most storied capitals. But before the cranes rose and the grand projects took shape, Australian photographer Simon Nowicki walked the streets of Paris with a camera and recorded something more personal: the everyday faces of the city.
Nowicki’s black and white photographs are street portraits — tight, candid, and direct. They show Parisians going about their daily lives: standing on corners, sitting at café tables, moving through markets and narrow side streets. The black and white format strips away distraction and puts the focus entirely on the people themselves.
Mitterrand’s presidency brought real changes to the lives of working French people. He raised the minimum wage, expanded family benefits, and introduced a fifth week of paid vacation for workers. These were not minor adjustments — they reshaped how ordinary Parisians lived and spent their time. The people in Nowicki’s photos were living through exactly that moment of change.
The Paris of 1981 still carried the texture of its older self. The grand renovation projects that would redefine the city were still years away. The Orsay Museum, which transformed a disused 19th-century railway station on the banks of the Seine into one of France’s most important art museums, did not open until 1986. The Opéra Bastille and the Grande Arche of La Défense were still on drawing boards.
What Nowicki captured, then, was Paris before its big makeover. The streets, the storefronts, the fashions, and the faces all belong to a city that was about to change but had not yet changed. That gives the photos a rare historical weight.
Street photography in a city like Paris requires patience and an eye for the ordinary. Nowicki’s work shows both. His subjects are not celebrities or public figures — they are shopkeepers, passersby, workers, and neighbors. Each frame is a small document of a real life, lived in a real place, at a specific moment in time.
The clothing, hairstyles, and street details visible throughout the series firmly place the images in their era. Early 1980s Paris had its own distinct look — a mix of classic French style and the bolder fashions creeping in from the late 1970s. Nowicki’s lens caught all of it without editorializing.
The Grand Louvre expansion project — one of Mitterrand’s most ambitious undertakings — was another major development that would reshape central Paris during the 1980s. The famous glass pyramid entrance, designed by architect I.M. Pei, became one of the decade’s most talked-about architectural additions to the city. None of that existed yet when Nowicki was shooting these frames.
Looking at these portraits today, the sense of time is immediate. The people photographed were living in a present that is now more than four decades in the past. Paris has shifted around them — new museums, new landmarks, new neighborhoods — but the human expressions captured here are still completely legible.
Nowicki’s choice to shoot in black and white was not simply aesthetic. It places the images outside of any particular trend and keeps the viewer’s attention on composition and subject rather than color or surface detail. The result is a set of photographs that feel timeless even as they document a very specific time.
Paris in 1981 was also a politically charged environment. Mitterrand’s election that year was the first time the French left had held the presidency under the Fifth Republic. His win energized a large segment of the French population. The energy of that moment — hopeful, uncertain, transitional — runs underneath the quiet street scenes Nowicki recorded.
The series as a whole functions as an unplanned archive. Nowicki set out to make photographs, not historical records — yet that is exactly what these images have become. Each frame preserves a fragment of a city and a people at a moment that no longer exists.
