Born in Bordeaux, the French photographer Jean Pierre Yves Petit (1886–1969) moved to Paris as a young man; there he parlayed a childhood passion for photography into a job at the august culture magazine L’Illustration, adopting the pen name Yvon to avoid confusion with a popular portrait photographer named Pierre Petit.

Yvon also drew inspiration from Paris’s moody weather. By exploiting the romantic potential of Paris’s clouds, mist and fog, in their ceaseless interplay with the sun, he created images that “stand well apart from views made by so many other photographers, who usually preferred sunny weather.”

Yvon established his studio in Paris in the 1920s and between the wars, he took thousands of photographs of the city. And here is a gorgeous collection of his work from the set “Yvon’s Paris” that he shot in the 1920s.