“Back then, everyone was kissing in the streets,” recalls Hans Mauli of his image of a couple embracing along the Seine. The 77-year-old Swiss-born photographer came upon the pair—possibly students, judging from the workbook at her side—close to the Sorbonne and the Boulevard St-Michel. “I leaned over the stone wall and held the camera in my outstretched hands,” says Mauli, who shot only one frame of the young lovers. Known for his black-and-white photography, he rarely used color film due to the expense. “I didn’t have much money at the time, so I often kept unprocessed film for years,” Mauli says. Though he knew he had taken a good shot, he didn’t print it until some 35 years later. Mauli, who now lives in St. Helena, California, still believes Paris is a city that inspires romance (“Everything is beautiful—the light, the architecture, the river”), but he isn’t sure there are as many displays of public passion these days: “So many people are looking at their smartphones instead of looking at each other.”