Paris Unadorned: Black And White Portraits Of The City Of Light, 1946

In early 1946, photographer Ed Clark journeyed to Paris (“the grand courtesan of all cities,” LIFE called the ancient town) to record the look and the feel of the French capital less than a year after the end of the Second World War. The pictures he made there chronicle not the cheerful, bawdy Paris of the popular imagination, but a place that, as LIFE told its readers, was a “grim and depressing disappointment” for any visitors expecting the Paris of Maxim’s, the Ritz, The Folies Bergère, the Moulin Rouge and the city’s other legendary, libidinous diversions.

The Parisians themselves, meanwhile, were “cold, hungry, confused and tired — above all, tired — too busy keeping themselves alive to bother much about entertaining. . . . [The typical American GI in Paris at the time] felt cheated. Where was the Paris he had heard about? Where were the naked women?”

More