Jean H. Herskovits is featured in our fifth installment of our guest post series. Jean uses a Nikon D90 camera and also is an avid user of his mobile phone a Samsung Galaxy S1 for images.

My name is Jean and I was born in Bucharest, Romania.  In 1969 my family moved from Romania to Paris, France when I was six years old..

I still speak Romanian and have recently spent six years in Bucharest as an expat, from 2004 to 2010.  You can say I have two cultures, but the French one is predominant.

I bought my first camera which was a second-hand Olympus OM-1 with my first wages from a summer job, in 1985 or 86, and started shooting regularly.

If you are from a generation old enough to remember these silver paper times, you will probably also remember that B&W was way cheaper than color photography.  So…

 The Left Bank has become a rather expensive tourist trap nowadays so we are eating and drinking the afternoon away in a darkly lit bistro on La Rive Droite, The Right Bank. The cassoulet contains mutton, pork skin, and white beans. We are pouring a table wine from a country estate in St. Emilion when a short little man, with a rat-like visage similar in look to Roman Polanski sidles up to our table. He knows we are foreign by the way we are dressed and, probably, by the loudness of our party.  We are, unashamedly, ugly Americans! Loud, rude, obnoxious. I am prone to blaming it on the wine consumed at such an early hour. Not quite 3 in the afternoon. He wants to show us Le Sacre Couer Basilica, Les Palais de Tuileries. He is offering his services as our own private tour guide when we explain we…

Down by the scrubby sands of the Los Angeles River, exploring life in the urban raw of the LA railway tracks where the hopes of freight train riders seem to ride forever through the past, present and future.