Hitotoki

Bienvenue à Paris

Lauren in Paris

We’re proud to announce the newest addition to Hitotoki’s narrative map of the world: Paris.

(Cue accordion music.) What other city has been as written about and mythologized as Paris? And yet, how often does the myth reflect the reality? Take it from us: not very often.  In Paris, the reality is so much better than the myth, and we hope Hitotoki Paris captures something of the vital spirit of the place—its cheek, its attitude, its poise, its mystery, its diversity—by putting you right there in the moment, in a particular place in Paris where something unique and personal is happening.

Roland Barthes develops the theory of the punctum in his book on photography, Camera Lucida. While the studium is the general field of a photograph (the subject matter, the thing that may interest you or attract you to the photograph), the punctum is the detail that interrupts the scene, the “accidental spark that reveals the ‘here and now’ of the photograph.”* “[P]iqûre, petit trou, petite tache, petite coupure—et aussi coup de dés.”** It is a rupture, a break. The punctum changes everything.

The studium, in this case, is Paris, or the particular setting of a hitotoki.  The punctum is that telling detail that yokes together the writer and this moment in this place in Paris. That turning point, that point of no return, that crystalline moment that could not occur anywhere else—that’s a hitotoki.

Many thanks to those who contributed stories, photos, and illustrations—please send us more. And to those of you who are just sitting on your submissions, or who have been meaning to sit down and write one for us—what are you waiting for? Send it in!

*Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography.
**“Sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice.” Barthes, Camera Lucida.