David Prowler Blog

Visitors to Paris’ Passage des Panoramas might be puzzled as they pass the storefront that used to house the stamp collector store Panoramas Philatélie.

The shelves in the window used to showcase stamps. Then the shop closed and the stamps were replaced by cobwebs.

I walk by every few days because I love the Passages, covered streets of shops and restaurants. This one, Passage des Panoramas, is the oldest remaining Passage in the city, dating to 1799.

It sat like that for about a year, surrounded by packed restaurants, cafes, and the specialty of the Passage: postcards.

Everything around it is thriving.

During the day and especially during the summer and around the holidays it is packed.

The restaurants, stamp stores, the gay sauna (that seems to attract a geriatric clientele and closes at 8 – so they can get home to their families I suppose), the wax museum – all jumping.

The potential haunted me.

I wanted to show some art in the window.

At that moment I happened to have a show of my art up, in another Passage, Passage Ste. Anne:

So I wrote a note in French and slipped it through the mail slot. I said I’m a neighbor and I’d like to clean the window and show some art, short or long term as convenient. I wrote that I would not need a key and that I would be happy to discuss a little rent.

But I have lived in Paris long enough to not expect much, even a reply. A few days later I passed through the Passage and I was surprised to see the letter gone.

Tossed, I assumed.

But then my phone rang.

It was the owner of the storefront. Raphaël lives upstairs with his kids and he told me he wasn’t “contre l’idée” and about an hour later we sat down for coffee and the deal was done:  free use of the window for as long as I like and he wasn’t even so interested in what I wanted to show. 

Which was good because I had no idea.

This was a Wednesday and by Saturday we were cleaning the window and on Sunday Pierre, Raphaël and I put the show up.

I already had the work. I went with the surrounding postcard theme and showed the set of Surrealist postcards I had done last year, in a signed and numbered edition of 100. You can see most of them in my previous post https://davidprowler.blog/2023/11/20/the-most-surrealist-spot-in-paris/.

With them, on a little easel, I put a set of used Metro tickets that over time I had picked up from the sidewalk.

 They’re in a gold frame. And look precious, like the postcards and postage stamps in the surrounding windows. Maybe they will become precious: Metro cards were discontinued a few months ago.

I had asked the framer to frame them like the diploma of a shady lawyer in a small city and he hit the mark.

I am very happy with this show. It isn’t a store or a gallery: nothing is for sale. And you can’t even go inside. It is open from 6 AM to midnight seven days a week and there is no explanatory text. I hope it helps people to see the beauty in commonplace scraps like used Metro tickets and the everyday Surrealism all around us.

I like the postcards and the Metro tickets, but what I like the most is the whole thing, this mysterious window in the middle of commerce. The art isn’t the postcards and the metro tickets; it’s the shop and the Passage and even the puzzled passersby.

And every few days I pass by and I spend an extra minute looking at people stopping to enjoy Panoramas Philatélie.