“During a brief trip to Paris, I contracted COVID and became stranded in Ricardo’s Montmartre apartment”, says Sol. “It was a sweltering July. At eighty years old, he was undergoing chemotherapy treatment. Neither of us could escape the situation; I couldn’t return to Argentina either. We were trapped in a timeless moment. I slept on his living room sofa for a month, surrounded by thousands of slides and images he would pull from his closets.
This man, who had made the street his stage and encounters with others his way of being in the world, for the first time had to stay indoors. It was an intimate and unexpected encounter.”
The part of Sol knew instantly that those dusty boxes full of photos were a real treasure. Domestic archives, photo slides, Polaroids have long become a tangible medium to reexamine the past with the contemporary optiсs. Archive photography allows us to get a glimpse of an era, lifestyle, people, and cities. Having found around 15,000 photo slides in Ricardo’s house, Sol got to live the historical moment when everything was possible, celebrities were more approachable, and morals were liberated.
Casually stumbling upon Jack Nicholson in the Bains Douches night club, partying with Kenzo, Grace Jones and Yves Saint Laurent. Celebrating first gay marriages, frequenting travesty shows – the air of sexual liberation was almost palpable.
Transformative new easthetic: hopeful transition for Spain
However, what was the context behind the parties, celebrities, and fashion pioneers? Ricardo Martinez Paz was born in a small Argentinian province. After several years of working in Buenos Aires, he moved first to Spain and then to Paris in the 70s, just when the club and party scene was emerging, revolutionizing city’s nightlife. He quickly becomes an impromptu columnist for the Spanish weekly Lib. José María Perceval told us that he met Ricardo at the defining moment of Spanish history:
“In the late 1970s, the country was undergoing a joyful and hopeful transition to democracy—one that demanded not only political restructuring but also a shift in the collective mindset.
It was necessary to revolutionize a society that had been cloistered and stagnant, not to mention utterly dull. This transformation involved numerous unresolved challenges: free speech—liberated from censorship, eroticism without constraints, the recognition of diversity, the rediscovery of bodily beauty, the creative blending of genres, and a bold performative art that had once been suppressed.
The magazine Lib was one of the leading forces—if not the leading force—in this revolution, merging provocation with a transformative new aesthetic. Ricardo played a key role in this transformation through journalism and photography, serving as a cultural ambassador—a bridge between Paris and Barcelona. His work connected the nightlife of Barcelona’s Paral·lel Avenue with the legendary Pigalle district—from Ángel Pavlovsky’s brilliant Ladies’ Orchestra to the iconic parties at Bains Douches, where one might encounter cultural icons like Andy Warhol, Jean-Paul Belmondo, or Princess Thurn und Taxis. He was the enlightened guide to that stellar world of Parisian runways, where the divine figures of reinvented cabaret reigned”.
From dusty archive to an exhibition and photobook
Two years after that summer, Sol was still determined to give a new life to Ricardo’s archive. She then received a fellowship at the Cité des Arts and had the opportunity to expand the project, giving it space and a chance for others to be part of the legendary Parisian nights. As Sol explains,
“As with any archive, there is a gesture of resistance—to exhibit these photographs is to allow the glow of those nights and those bodies to continue radiating across centuries, finding a new rhythm. Yet this act carries a deeper significance: it is also a resistance to oblivion and to death.”
And what’s a better way to preserve memory and photography than making a photo book? In June 2025 Sol and Ricardo headed to Sicily to meet 89books and to elaborate their project. We were impressed by Ricardo’s archive, just as Sol was when she discovered it years ago. Selecting, sequencing, printing our first dummies… It takes time to make a beautiful book.
Desde Paris
64,00 €
