Galerie Roger-Viollet: Paris after dark

If Paris is a moveable feast, as Hemingway famously wrote, then night remains its most seductive setting – much to the dismay of the city’s grumbling early sleepers. Known for its thematic exhibitions, the ever-vibrant Galerie Roger-Viollet turnsits lens toward seven decades of Parisian nightlife through some seventy photographs tracing the capital’s nocturnal rhythms since the dawn of the 20th century. Entertainment, certainly, but also labor, wandering and urban solitude. “La nuit n’est pas le négatif du jour,” wrote French novelist Paul Morand – night is not the negative of day. This exhibition proves exactly that, revealing Paris by turns joyful, romantic, mischievous and faintly illicit. From the neon glow of Pigalle to the banks of the Seine and the bustling maze of Les Halles, an extraordinary cast of photographers captures the city’s after-hours soul in all its cinematic beauty.