And here was I, always the outsider. An Austrian among the Germans, a queer among the straights, a Jew among the gentiles. Perhaps the life I should build was with vagrants and the whores and the outcasts, the only people who had ever shown me any kindness. The ones I’d spent my life in Paris photographing, setting their features onto paper. The immortal vagabonds, the real aristocrats of Paris, covered in her soot, sapped by her modernity, resting nightly in her concrete bosom.
