Fotografen in Lille

Lille reads Flemish before it reads French, and that is what makes it photograph unlike anywhere else in the country. The Grand'Place — Place du Général-de-Gaulle on the signs, Grand'Place to everyone who lives there — is a rank of seventeenth-century facades in red brick and gold sandstone, with the Vieille Bourse along one side, the Déesse column in the middle and the belfry of the Chamber of Commerce rising behind the roofs. The Vieille Bourse is the surprise: twenty-four merchant houses built around one small arcaded courtyard, open most afternoons as a second-hand book market with chess players in the corner. It is covered, it is the size of a tennis court, and it is where a session goes when the northern sky turns, which it does often. Vieux Lille starts one street north — Rue de la Monnaie, Rue Basse, the tiny Place aux Oignons — brick and stone fronts in ox-blood and cream, wrought-iron shop signs, lanes narrow enough that two people fill the frame. Place de la République gives the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a broad flight of steps and enough room to stand back from a nineteenth-century facade. Ten minutes west on foot, the Citadelle — Vauban's five-pointed star, still an army base, so the walls are seen from outside — sits in a park of plane trees, canals and a long avenue where the Deûle splits. Light here is northern and soft, which flatters faces; May, June and September are the reliable months, and from late November the Grand'Place fills with the Christmas market's wooden village and a big wheel.