Grégoire Huret’s relationship with photography began on a trip to New York with his father’s Rollei 35. The camera was small enough to disappear into long days of walking from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens. Only after returning to Paris and developing the film did the experience become decisive. The delayed discovery of those images convinced him to continue.
Years later, walking remains the foundation of his practice.
Paris as an endless street
Huret has lived in Paris for more than seventeen years. He treats the city as an inexhaustible photographic environment made from people, movement, clothing and chance.
With a camera in hand, faces and attitudes become more visible. A message on a T-shirt, an unusual gesture, a distinctive outfit or the way a person occupies the pavement can be enough to trigger a photograph. Luck matters, but luck has to meet attention.
A waitress in New York
One photograph from his second New York trip remains a turning point. Using a Contax RTS, a 35mm Zeiss lens and Kodak T-Max 100, Huret photographed a waitress from behind in a Lower East Side restaurant. Her scarf, the flash and the immediacy of the scene produced an image that stayed with him.
He later printed it at 40 × 60 cm, exhibited it and sold copies. A photography magazine also noticed the work, giving him confidence that his analogue practice had found a meaningful direction.
The image became important not only because of the moment itself, but because of everything that happened to it afterward.
Not romanticising film
Huret is refreshingly unsentimental about analogue photography. Film costs more and takes more time. He believes contemporary digital editing can reproduce much of the visual appearance people associate with grain and contrast.
What keeps him with film is therefore something else: the relationship with a tool that has stayed reliable over time. His Leica M6 and 35mm Summicron have been his regular Paris setup for more than a decade. Kodak Tri-X 400 fits the city’s shifting weather and his own black-and-white development routine.
The pleasure is partly in the incomplete control. Developing a roll still contains the possibility of disappointment, and that uncertainty keeps the process alive.
Travelling without being a tourist
New York remains foundational, but Berlin changed Huret’s idea of photographic travel. He visited with a photographer friend and spent days walking without a tourist itinerary, looking only for photographs.
He was drawn to what he perceived as Berlin’s internal contradiction: order and environmental awareness alongside a freer, younger, punk energy. For the first time outside Paris, wandering itself became the entire purpose of the trip.
Paris Fashion Week offers another kind of temporary city. Celebrities, models, students, fans and ordinary passers-by occupy the same streets, each carrying different social codes and styles. Over time Huret has learned where and when these encounters are likely to happen without losing the spontaneity he values.
From shooting like a maniac to waiting
Huret says he once photographed almost compulsively, influenced strongly by Everybody Street. At forty-one and now a father, he works more calmly. He still shoots instinctively and from the hip, but he is also more willing to stop, speak to someone and ask for a portrait.
Patience has not replaced spontaneity; it has expanded the range of situations he can respond to.
Avenue de Rivoli and Paname Paper
His current long-term project follows Avenue de Rivoli, walking repeatedly between different social and tourist zones of Paris. The changing populations along the route—fashion-conscious Marais crowds, international visitors near the Louvre, wealthier streets toward Opéra—give the avenue its own shifting sociology.
He is also interested in what happens after photographs are made. Paname Paper #1 – Modes de vie, published in 2024, uses the form of a newspaper rather than a conventional photobook or zine to organise his view of Paris. Producing it forced him to think about sequence, paper, format and the image as part of a larger object.
A witness to his time
Huret wants the photographs to feel sincere. The apparent instantaneity of street photography conceals the many hours required to be present when something finally aligns.
There may be luck in the decisive frame, but there is no easy photograph. Walking, looking and returning turn chance into a way of witnessing the period in which he lives.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
