The guide
A park that behaves like a landscape
Most Paris parks are flat, formal and designed to be walked through. This one was built in a disused quarry and behaves like countryside that has been compressed: a lake, a cliff of some fifty metres, a temple on top of it, a grotto with a waterfall, and paths that climb.
For photographs it means something rare in the city — real depth. You can put somebody in the foreground with a valley behind them, in the tenth largest city in Europe.
The climb is the constraint
Everything good here is at a different height from everything else good here. The lake is at the bottom, the temple is at the top, the grotto is off to one side, and the paths connecting them are steep enough that people arrive at each one slightly out of breath.
An hour covers perhaps three of those points, not five. We choose them in advance and walk a loop rather than crossing the park twice, and for anyone with a pushchair or a bad knee we stay on the lower circuit.
Seasons
Autumn is the reason to come. The slopes are heavily wooded, the turn is sudden, and from the middle of October the light comes in almost horizontally under the trees in the late afternoon.
Winter is the second choice and an underrated one: bare branches make the cliff, the grotto and the ironwork legible in a way the summer canopy hides, and on a weekday the park is nearly empty.
Summer works better here than in most of the city, because there is enough shade to photograph at two in the afternoon without anyone squinting.
What it suits
Family sessions, because children treat it as terrain rather than as a park and photograph accordingly. Couples who want something with scenery in it rather than architecture. And maternity sessions on the lower circuit, where the walking is level and there is somewhere to sit every fifty metres.
It is in the nineteenth, well away from the tourist centre, which is part of why it stays usable. Rates are on the rate card.