Uncle Bill remembered that the photo worked. “It brought him out of it,” he said.

It was during that time in Chicago that my dad faced a choice that would determine much of his later course in life, between the steady career of a clinical psychologist and the unpredictable life of an artist. “It bothered him quite a bit,” Uncle Bill recalled, “working with the disturbed kids. He decided he didn’t want to do that.” Aunt Carol remembered the same conflict: “He told me that he was getting less and less interested in psychology and more and more interested in photography.“ Walt decided that his passion and greater happiness lay with photography. He returned to Paris in 1948 as part of a wave of artists and students attracted to a post-war renaissance underway in that city.

He established another studio in Paris and worked as a photojournalist, selling photo essays to French and American magazines and newspapers, including Life Magazine. One of the stories he sold was a photo essay on the migration of Parisians into the country to pick daffodils in the spring. The photos he took during that time often reflected interests that stayed with him throughout life. When he returned to California, for example, he loved to travel into the hills to see the fields of California poppies in bloom. Much later in life, when visiting family members, he often brought a bunch of daffodils from his farm as a gift.

During his Paris years, Walt met Janine Pistolet. Janine’s mother had moved her out of Paris during the war in an effort to keep her safe. The young people Janine knew in the countryside were part of the French resistance. She still tears up when she tells of the time she heard that some of the boys would never be coming back. They had been killed by German soldiers. After the war, she returned to Paris to live in the Latin Quarter.

My mother describes those times as “a very special period in a very special place.” She said the Latin Quarter was made up of French and American students and artists who studied during the day and went out at night. “Everybody was in a good mood because they were so happy to be free from the occupation,” she said. She remembers hanging around with Walt and another tall American, Lester Gottlieb. The first time she met Gottlieb, he was touting a new drink he had discovered, a combination of champagne and dark beer. She said those two “big, nosey guys” could drink all night. She recalls going out with them one night when they ended up on a stage in a club, singing their version of “Stormy River.” “They were gesticulating all over the stage, these two big guys, one more awkward than the other,” my mom said. “They got a wild applause.”

She describes Walt as a “kind of genius” when it came to his photography. Many of the techniques he used, she would see used later by successful, “avant-garde” artists. The photos remain remarkable images that captured the life of ordinary people, whether it was a woman buying flowers in a marketplace, a street entertainer swallowing a sword or a group of “clochards,” hobos who lived under bridges along the Seine.

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