ABOUT THE AUTHOR
How I came to Paris
I’m Jiawa Liu, the author and photographer behind 7 Days a Parisian.
Ten years ago, I moved to Paris with no friends, no job and no real plan beyond the conviction that this was the city I wanted to call home.
I grew up in Perth, Australia, and spent the first part of my career working as a commercial lawyer. Alongside that life, I had begun a fashion blog as a creative outlet. That small project gradually became a career of its own and, eventually, brought me to Paris for the first time.
I had never particularly romanticised France. If anything, I arrived suspicious of all the mythology surrounding Paris: the sophistication, the beauty, the effortless je ne sais quoi. I assumed the real city would inevitably disappoint.
Instead, I fell completely in love with the city.
Not only with its monuments or architecture, but with the way life seemed to be lived here: cafés where no one appeared in a hurry to leave, gardens full of people doing very little at all, old shops and markets woven into everyday routines, and an almost stubborn commitment to taking pleasure seriously.
I returned to Australia knowing I wanted to come back. A month in Paris became several months; several months became a new life. I left the law, moved permanently and never really looked back.
There is a French word that came to explain much of what I loved about Paris: flâneur.
The flâneur is not simply someone who wanders, but someone who observes — a participant in city life who is constantly looking, noticing and interpreting.
That became the way I came to know Paris.
For more than a decade I have walked the city's neighbourhoods, photographed its streets, sat at its cafés, returned to the same markets, watched shops disappear and others become institutions, and gradually accumulated my own mental map of the city.
At the same time, Paris changed the direction of my working life. I became a fashion editor, contributing to titles including Vogue Australia and Harper’s Bazaar Singapore, and later a creative director and photographer working with international fashion and luxury brands.
Photography, whether it was with my camera or just with my smartphone, became the way I appreciated the beauty I saw everyday.
What I have never quite grown out of, however, is the perspective of the person who first arrived here as a visitor.
That combination — knowing Paris intimately while still being surprised by it everyday — is at the heart of 7 Days a Parisian.
THE COLLECTION
Paris beyond the book
As extensive as the book is, its 344 pages could only contain a fraction of everything I wanted to share.
