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I Love Your Stories is a soulful conversation series hosted by artist and creative guide Hava Gurevich, where art meets authenticity. Each episode invites you into an intimate dialogue with artists, makers, and visionaries who are courageously crafting lives rooted in creativity, purpose, and self-expression.
From painters and poets to healers and community builders, these are the stories behind the work—the moments of doubt, discovery, grief, joy, and transformation. Through honest, heart-centred conversations, Hava explores how creativity can be both a healing force and a path to personal truth.
If you’re an artist, a dreamer, or someone drawn to a more intuitive and intentional way of living, this podcast will remind you that your story matters—and that the act of creating is a sacred, revolutionary act.
[MUSIC]
What if one accidental photograph and one
chance meeting in an airport could change
the course of your creative life, setting
off a career-defining
photographic journey
through Paris?
Welcome back to All of Your Stories.
I'm your host, Hava Gurvitch, and today
I'm joined by
photographer and author Gary Zirkur,
the artist behind The Glow of Paris, The
Bridges of Paris at
Night, a project born from two
beautiful mistakes.
That accidental overexposed frame became
the spark for a six-year
quest to photograph every
Paris bridge under the magic of night.
Gary shares how the project unfolded, the
book, the
exhibitions, and why he chose to
photograph in winter.
And he retells the unexpected encounter
in Mexico City that
first brought him to Paris,
and eventually to his wife.
We also talk about his unusual dual
career in business and
photography, the discipline
of mastering a craft, and why he believes
every photographer should experience real
film in the darkroom.
If you love stories of creative
persistence, romance, chance, and a
long-term project that
reshapes a life, this episode is for you.
Gary, welcome to the episode.
Now quick word from our sponsor, and then
we'll get right back to the show.
When I started selling my art, I had
absolutely no idea how to
actually turn it into a business,
a professional business.
And then I came across art storefronts,
and that was a game changer.
I've been a customer now for years, and
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Check them out, artstorefronts.com, and
tell them how I sent you.
Welcome back to the podcast.
And I'm really excited for my guest
today, the celebrated
photographer, Gary Zirker.
Gary, it's an honor and a pleasure to
have you on the episode.
I want to extend a very warm, warm hello
from my mom, who you
might know is your number
one fan.
And I joke that you are her favorite
artist who's not her daughter.
But let's just start if you could just
tell us a little bit
about yourself, how you got
into photography, and especially the
Paris Bridges Project,
which is the work that, at
least for me, you're best known for.
Sure, I'd be glad to.
But instead of going back from the day I
was born and talking to
you about everything that's
happened since, I'll talk to you about
the project of
photographing the bridges of Paris
at night and how it started.
It started from a mistake.
I was out shooting one night in Paris and
decided to shoot a photo of the Alexander
III Bridge, which I think is one of the,
well, it's the most
beautiful bridge in Paris,
and it's one of the most beautiful
bridges in the world.
I shot the shot, I looked at what I'd
done, and I realized
that I had overexposed it to
like three or four stops.
And in order to try to save the negative
when I got back to the darkroom, I
decided to under-develop
the film.
So overexposure and under-development, it
was something I had
read about in one of the
Ansel Adams books.
I hadn't really done it before.
So I got a negative
and it looked very good.
I printed it and the
print took my breath away.
I mean, it was blowing, it was luminous.
I thought, "Wow, why don't I just shoot
all of the bridges of
Paris at night using the
same method?"
And I thought, "Well, gee, if I do that,
it's probably going to
take a year or more."
So that was mistake number two.
It took five years.
And after the five years, then I spent
another year
investigating or studying the history
of each of the bridges so that when I
made the book, "The
Glow of Paris, the Bridges
of Paris at Night," it would be a book
that was not just
photos, but it will be a book
that had some meat to it that explained
the history of the
bridges in the background.
So in answer to your first question,
that's how the project got started.
That's how the project got started.
I would like to go back in time a little
bit, not to the day you
were born, but you have
been a photographer for a long time.
Where did you go to school?
I think you did.
You studied
photography, I believe, in Paris?
Well, I studied at the Parsons School of
Design in Paris, but I
went to a university at the
Ohio State University.
I see you're chuckling.
No, I'm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, right?
I don't care.
Yes, and you know
what happened last week.
I heard.
And what else did you ask?
You wanted my education.
Yeah, when did you study?
What got you into
photography in the first place?
In the first place, what got me into
photography was I was working on a merit
badge for Boy Scouts.
I created a kind of a dark
room in my parents' basement.
And when I developed that first print,
and I saw it emerge
from its liquid bath, and
saw what it looked like, I
just fell in love with it.
That's how I really got
started doing photography.
I had a dual-earrier business on the one
hand, and photography on the other.
And I started doing a number of
companies, and built them, and sold them.
At the same time, I was doing
professional photography.
What got you to Paris?
How did you end up in
Paris in the first place?
It started in Cancun, Mexico.
As it does.
I was on business, and I was in the
Cancun, Mexico airport terminal.
And a beautiful young French woman came
up to me and asked if
she could read my paper.
She and her other girlfriend had been on
vacation in Isla Muerres,
an island off of Cancun, and
had been out of touch with civilization.
I had the Mexico City Daily News that I
brought down that
morning, and it was in English.
I gave her the newspaper, and I said, and
we were both going
back to Mexico City, but
I was connecting out to Guadalajara.
And I said, "You know, if I get back
tonight in time, do you
two want to have a drink?"
They said, "Sure."
And so I went to Guadalajara.
I came back from Guadalajara.
In my hotel room, I called their hotel.
They were staying at
a really fancy place.
It was called the Holiday in Mexico City.
And you wouldn't expect
this to happen in Mexico.
I called the hotel, and the woman who
answered the phone said, "Oh, yes.
They've been waiting for your call."
So they were in the restaurant.
She said, "I'll put you through."
So they were in the restaurant.
I went and met with them, and
we had a drink and so forth.
What I didn't find out until much later
was they were waiting
for a call from this guy
named Ramey, who was going
to take him to Plaza Gaudí.
They weren't waiting for my call.
Anyhow, this was October, and I hate to
tell you how long ago it is.
This was October 1979.
And as we parted that
evening, Dominique was her name.
I said to Dominique, "Dominique, would
you like to have dinner
together on November 17th?"
And this was October.
I knew I had to be in Germany for
business, and I knew that
on the way back I could stop
in Paris if there was reason.
And so she said, "Sure."
And she gave me her number at her office.
And I called from Germany, we made
arrangements to meet for
dinner, and I went to Paris and
decided that what I wanted to do is stay
at the best hotel in
Paris just to impress.
So I stayed at the Plaza Ateni.
I don't know if you ever heard of that,
but as a matter of
fact, the Plaza Ateni Hotel
is where Mata Hari was arrested in 1910
or 12, something like that.
It's a great, great hotel.
Now Dominique was
supposed to show up at 7 o'clock.
We were going to go to dinner.
I sat there, 7 o'clock, came and went.
705 came and went.
710 came and went.
And I thought, "Here I am waiting up here
in my room for her to call me.
Why don't I go down to
the lobby and wait for her?"
So I went to the
elevator and it wasn't working.
And I didn't know it at the time, but as
soon as I walked out of
the room, my phone started
to ring.
And it was forever.
And I finally got down to the lobby as I
saw the back end of
Dominique going out the
front door because she just got tired of
no answer in the room, no contact.
I yelled at her and actually we had
dinner at the Plaza Ateni.
And the remarkable thing about the dinner
was we ordered, food was
delivered, salt shaker,
put some salt on that food.
And Dominique looked at me and she said,
"You've just salted your food.
They have a chef here
who knows what he's doing.
He knows how to cook food.
He does it properly.
And you haven't even tasted it.
You put salt on it."
Well, it was right.
You know, what can you do with a woman
like that except marry her?
So I did.
So that's what took me to Paris.
And we bought an
apartment in Paris in 1993.
In 2000, I sold the last of the companies
that I had and
decided that we would spend
more time in Paris.
And so we bought a larger apartment.
And that is how I got to...
That's a long story in
answer to a short question.
But it's very funny because that story is
full of like near misses.
Oh, man, they were near misses.
Coincidences.
And it just seems like...
So the body of work, the Paris Bridges,
can I say it's like the
defining work, your artistic
opus, in a sense, right?
Yes, it is.
And when you start talking about it, you
start by saying it
started from two mistakes.
It started from two
mistakes and can't go in Mexico.
So this is what's really fun about that.
And this is something, this is a thread
that I like to pick up
in all conversations.
When we look back at our successes or
like the things that
the pivotal moments in our
lives and we kind of like
look back, how did I get here?
More often than not, it's
something that just was...
Missed the bus, had to take the subway
and met the love of my
life on the subway kind
of thing.
And it's just a really interesting just
observation about life in
general that you just never
know when a lot of times the most benign
moments become the best.
So you stayed in Paris for five years
photographing all the bridges.
And did you decide to
publish your own book or did you...
How did the book come about?
Because you have an award-winning book
about the project and
you said you also did a ton
of research about all the bridges.
So it's a very rich in
information and imagery.
And I'm gonna just say, I showed the book
to my mom and she confiscated it from me.
And it took her a few days to look
through it because she was very busy.
But when she finally did,
she's like, "Oh my God."
And you inspired her because they go to
Paris a lot and you
inspired her to go and visit
the bridges.
So, yeah, so you had all this material.
What happened next?
Well, when I started to do the project, I
had no grand plan in mind.
I didn't know what I
was gonna do with it.
I didn't even know I was gonna finish it.
It was just, I just decided,
"Well, why don't I do this?"
And the more I got into it, the more it
grabs hold of you and you
can't quit in the middle
of the thing.
But I didn't have a book in mind until I
was almost done with the project.
And then because I decided, "Well, you
know what I could do
with the photographs is put
them in a book," when I decided that, I
decided I made that
decision to study what the bridges
were all about historically and so forth.
And that was a fairly intense study.
There's a lot of things that are on the
internet about some of
the bridges that are wrong.
You have to, you really
have to pick and choose.
I was able to use some archival data and
I bought every book
that was ever written about
the bridges.
But in the end, I think that the
information of the bridges really
complements the photographs
to make it more of a, just
instead of a picture book.
I don't know what word to call it, but...
It's the definitive
book of the Paris Bridges.
At night.
At night.
The void of people.
Well, interestingly, I also researched
whether anybody had ever
done what I did before.
I'd found that there was no record of
anyone ever shooting
bridges, all of them, at night.
So that was an
impetus to continue the job.
You know, I shot during the winter only.
And the reason is because in the summer,
it doesn't get dark in
Paris until 11, little
after 11, and they turn the lights out on
the bridges at midnight.
So you really don't have the opportunity
to get good nighttime photography.
And secondly, it's just full of tourists.
As soon as they see somebody with a
tripod and a camera,
they want to talk about the
camera that they've got
or the pictures they took.
And the last thing you want to do is
spend time talking
with a bunch of tourists.
So shooting in the winter was good
because the tourists aren't there.
Should winter at night, you might guess.
Yeah.
I tell you, it was kind of inspiring to
be alone in the middle
of the night, down by
the Seine River, maybe 24, 25 degrees
outside, and just kind of
communicating with the river
and the bridges because you're all alone.
It's an interesting feeling to do that.
I mean, it's almost
like the city is empty.
Yeah, so so you you decided to do a book
Mark Corp additions is the publisher
And the book one of an award. Yeah
It's the IPE gold medal award amazing. I
forget what IPE stands for
it's IPP why something or that?
it got that at the
annual New York Book Convention
When the book first came out and the
photographs themselves, I believe they
are in permanent collections
Both yeah, they're in the Library of
Congress and Georgetown University
Evansville
Indiana Museum
collection that's amazing and
more importantly
that you created an
Exhibition a photography exhibition that
like a museum exhibition
for for this collection
The industry term is
a traveling exhibition
And that's kind of how we met
As a director of a traveling exhibitions
company you contacted me
You sent me the book you sent me
information about you
You know, it was incredible photography
It was it was a no-brainer to
say yes, let's work together
You did have
one or two shows in Paris
Do you want to tell me about two of them?
Yes. Yeah, I was contacted by the
adjunct to the mayor of Paris
boat
About the photography so I met with her
Took her book the book
the book the go of Paris
Is in English and in French
and in French, it's called
Parisi Lumine and the
quanto Paris la nouille
And so I gave her
both of those books. She
She liked what she saw
That that ended up being a contract
between the mayor and me
to
exhibit the photos in Paris
The City Hall of Paris what a lot of
people don't know it's
called the Hotel de Ville
And it's not a hotel
but the Hotel de Ville has
exhibitions and
That my exhibition was
in October and November of
two years ago 23 and
then
Later. I said to get three exhibitions.
It was an exhibition at the
Gallery GAD collection in Paris that was
right after that and
then last year there was an
exhibition of the same photographs at the
at the
Hotel de Ville around is more of the 13th
of run this ball the
mayor of the around is more
Set up the exhibition
Didn't you also have?
larger
Photographs displayed on this like in
public. Am I yes. Yes. Yes
They were displayed on the grills of the
Hotel de Ville. Okay, and
There there was a linear linear
Distance of the grills of about
250 yards or about about almost the size
of a football field Wow
and the photos were along
Along the route of Rivoli, which is one
of the most well-known streets
And those are very large photographs.
Yes, they were printed on
Dibond aluminum and
They were 40 inches wide
by five foot
Wow. Oh, yeah, I've never they were
really very big and as a matter of fact,
I I had to take the negatives and
Re scan them to a higher definition
So that they would roll up that nicely
that big and they did
they were really look nicely
You shoot 35 millimeter
or was it medium format?
Medium format medium format. Yeah, I had
to be because there's so much detail
You can't get that from a thirty. I would
like to have shot in in large format
but being
On the street in Paris at night. I
Didn't want to have a yeah. I
Didn't want to have a
blanket over my head looking into
Never know who'd come up behind you and
hitting you on the back of the head. Oh,
but that brings up another thought
Paris I
Found was very very safe very safe
So the the book is done
the there's been exhibitions
Um
What are you most excited about right
now? What are you working on? What is
what is your current passion?
Well, it has nothing to do with
photography that's fine
I'm involved with the
Association of Americans residents
overseas and I'm on the
board of directors there
and so I'm spending a lot of time working
with the Association and and
approaching
The problems of Americans living overseas
there are they there are a lot of
problems for Americans who live overseas
Most of which are
created by the US government
And and for instance
If you have a bank
account and you move overseas
Your bank will probably cancel you if you
don't have a US address
so one of the problems is for
Americans overseas to have a US address
You need a US address. Well,
especially if people are on
Social Security
Any type of America US program because
the US does not issue
paper checks anymore
right and so they have to have a US bank
account to receive money
from the US government and
Pay their taxes and so forth. So that's
just one problem
voting is another problem
Citizenship is another problem
But it's it's a challenging situation and
it's interesting and they the
people that are involved on the
Aar oh it's pronounced arrow
People who are involved in arrow are
really great people with good back great
backgrounds and it's a lot of fun and
pleasure to work with
Any any
Photography projects
that you're entertaining
I'm not doing any right
now. I think sometimes about
another project, but
you know in truth of fact
If I had known
That it was going to
take me five to six years
When I started that
project, I never would have done it
But having done it, I'm
just thrilled that I did it
Yeah
so thinking about that project
as far as your art career that was that
was a huge success and
It has been a huge success and it
continues it continues
To to live out its own life
How would you as
An artist as a photographer as an artist
like what is for you the definition of
success and how has it
changed from when you started?
That's an interesting question because
there's two different answers to it
There's the quick the answer. How do you
define success from
my business standpoint?
I define success from
the artistic standpoint. I
think the
Measure of success from
the artistic standpoint is
Knowing that you've done a good job and
There are many things that prove to
yourself that you've done a good job how
it's received by other people
So even even what kind of
media coverage you've been from it
But it's mostly
it's mostly determining that you have
done you and you yourself
have done a good job and
You look at what you've done
And you think there isn't an awful lot
that I could have done
any better. Yeah, I did this
And that that's good now on the other
hand of on business how
much you sell the business for
Um, no, no, but also in business having a
good product having good
Satisfied customers and
Having a good team of people that you
that you have hired. Yeah
Um, if you were to talk to a photographer
that is just starting out their career
What advice would you give them the first
advice I would give them is to
in addition to your digital camera go
into a darkroom and learn how to
develop film print film and also how to
go out and shoot on film because
There's a basis there
bases of an educational basis
That gives you a
certain bunch of information
But you don't get digitally
so it would and then do
your digital photography, but
It gives you a basis to to think more
broadly. I believe and just
Just digitally, you know
when I would shoot at night
I would shoot maybe three or four rolls
at the most of film and there's 12
Exposures on each roll of film. So, you
know in a night I might get 48 shots
You know, you'd go out digitally and you
can get 48,000 shots
right
But I'm not negative on digital. I mean I
use it myself sure and
It's it's amazing how
far it has come from
Yeah beginnings and what you can do with
it now, but one of the things
With digital is you can lie
Yes
Digital photography you can lie you can't
do that very easily with
Yeah, there's only so much
dodging and burning you can do
exactly
So in addition to being a photographer
you said that you had a dual career you
had a photography you had a career as a
photographer, but you also
Started businesses you had several
businesses. I'd love
to hear more about that
Well, I have several businesses and I
also am a commercial multi-engine
instrument rated pilot
I have two thousand one hundred hours
pilot and command time
The
Businesses the first the
first one was called wave tech
wave tech manufactured
wave making machinery
wave making machinery for
water parks and swimming pools and
we were
involved in the beginning
of the water park industry
Anyhow, I mean we our customers were well
Disney and and
group called wet and wild
Worldwide we had done
about two just under 200
wave pools
And and I was really quite
successful when I sold it
There was a little fountain
called raindrop and
I sold the business and I
said I want to keep the raindrop
And so I kept the raindrop and ended up
creating the company
called raindrop products and
What we what we manufactured worse
children's water playground
components
You see now
If you're looking for it, you see water
the water playgrounds and spray grounds
all over the country
So and we made we did a lot of those and
that was the company that I sold in
But back on the pilot thing one day I
was with another guy and
We decided to take a trip. It might be
That's and we were in we I lived in
Mansfield, Ohio at the time
and we flew from Mansfield to
for Lauderdale
And Fort Lauderdale to the Turks and
Caicos Islands and from
there to Caracas Venezuela
Quito Ecuador to Lara, Peru
Lima, Peru
Santiago Chile
Antofagasta Chile over the
Andes to Rio Gallego, Argentina
Down to Ocea Waja at the
very tip of South America
Then the next I mean this took a while
but the day after we got to Ocea Waja
We took that day and just flew around
Cape Horn just to look at it and see the
beauty of that whole area
and then we came back through
Argentina
Uruguay
rode it Brazil and
Suriname back up to
Ohio was quite a trip. It
took a month to do it Wow
But you know it was easy to net navigate
because going down South America. You
just you know keep
the water on your right
Coming back you keep the water on your
right. Yeah, I'm lost
Well, that's a good that's a good place
to end the interview on
Thank you
It's been a pleasure
finally meeting you in person after all
those years of talking on the phone and
At least now I know
what you look like exactly
And I wish you continuing success
And thank you very much for being here
My pleasure it's been a pleasure to be with you
Thanks again for tuning in that's our
episode. I hope you enjoyed it
And if you did, please help us out by
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