Edward (Ed) Clark
American, 1911-2000
Selling Flowers on the Banks of the Seine, 1946
Silver gelatin print
Hand-signed, dated, and notated "Life" along lower edge. Depicting a merchant on a rainy day, paused at the edge of a sidewalk overlooking the river. Mounted behind glass, metal frame.

From Life: Paris Unadorned: Portraits of the City of Light, 1946
"In early 1946, photographer Ed Clark journeyed to Paris (“the grand courtesan of all cities,” LIFE called the ancient town) to record the look and the feel of the French capital less than a year after the end of World War II. The pictures he made there chronicle not the cheerful, bawdy Paris of the popular imagination, but a place that, as LIFE told its readers, was a “grim and depressing disappointment” for any visitors expecting the Paris of Maxim’s, the Ritz, the Folies Bergère, the Moulin Rouge and the city’s other legendary, libidinous diversions.

The Parisians themselves, meanwhile, were “cold, hungry, confused and tired above all, tired too busy keeping themselves alive to bother much about entertaining. . . . [The typical American GI in Paris at the time] felt cheated. Where was the Paris he had heard about?”

The Paris [of Clark’s photos] is the Paris of the Parisians and of anyone else who will take her. She is unadorned, somber and beautiful. Most of the pictures were taken in mist or rain, when the sharp, clean lines of the city’s spires and the bridges pierce through a curtain of gray. This is the Paris that neither Germans nor GIs could change. Even in the age of the atom bomb, she is as indestructible as the river."

About the artist: Ed Clark was a 20th century photographer who worked primarily for Life magazine. His best remembered work captured a weeping Graham W. Jackson, Sr. playing his accordion as the body of the recently deceased President Franklin D. Roosevelt was being transported to Washington, DC.

His work came to the notice of Life, which made him a stringer in 1936. A 1942 photograph of World War I hero Alvin York registering for "The Old Man's Draft" brought a job offer, but he turned it down; "I was raising two young boys, and New York didn't seem like the place to raise them," he later explained. However, he changed his mind, becoming a staff photographer in 1944, after Life allowed him to remain in Tennessee for a few years.
Image 9.40 x 13 1/2 in. (23.88 x 34.29 cm.), frame: 16.40 x 20 1/4 in. (41.66 x 51.44 cm.)