Where are we? Rue Castagnary in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, by the train tracks of the Montparnasse Station that serves western France.

This lighthouse is nothing but an advertisement for a fish market. But I dream of going inside and opening a window so as to greet Bretons in their trains arriving in Paris.

A 6 heures du matin, il fait déjà grand jour en ce moment. Dans un ciel annonçant enfin une belle journée de juin, se dresse un phare. Mais les seuls bruits qu’on entend ici ne sont ni les cris des mouettes, ni le reflux des vagues… mais celui des voitures et des trains !

Où sommes-nous? Rue Castagnary dans le 15e arrondissement de Paris, le long des voies de la gare Montparnasse qui dessert l’Ouest de la France.

Ce phare n’est qu’une publicité pour une halle aux poissons. Mais je rêve d’y entrer, d’ouvrir une fenêtre pour saluer dans leur train les Bretons qui arrivent à Paris.

Photo and text © 2014, Va-nu-pieds.

More of Va-nu-pieds’ work can be seen here on France Revisited and here on the photographer’s own site.

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* * *

By Elise Prudhomme

André Le Nôtre designed the Garden of Versailles to display, reflect and serve as the backdrop for the pomp and glory and power of the reign of Louis XIV. As such the garden functioned as a direct extension of the palace itself.

Piqued by Nicolas Fouquet’s audacious success with the Château of Vaux-le-Vicomte which he visited in 1661, Louis XIV enlisted the three men who had contributed to that success—the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter-decorator Charles Le Brun and the landscape gardener André Le Nôtre—to create the palace of all palaces: Versailles.

Over more than 50 years of adult reign, the king would devote much of his time and energy, when France was not at war, to enlarging and embellishing the 800 hectares (1977 acres) of land called the Domain of Versailles which now contains 200,000 trees, 50 fountains and 620 water jets fed by 35 km (21.7 miles) of water pipeline. In a monumental example of man’s attempt to balance order and disorder, culture and nature, spontaneity and reflection, Le Nôtre served the king by creating architecture from nature.

Through his self-incarnation as the Sun King, Louis XIV used metaphor and symbolism as constant echoes and demonstrations of his power. From the king’s ceremonial dressing and rise in the morning (le lever du Roi) to his ceremonial undressing and putting to bed at night (le coucher du Roi), by way of a well-regulated day that included a walk in the garden under the watchful eye of the Court, Louis XIV exposed his lives to the public eye with the aim of concentrating and asserting their power. Integral part of this goal, the Garden of Versailles served the strategic purpose of promoting the king’s power while amusing and containing the masses of Court subjects, twin arms in preventing them from plotting against him.

The garden was an immediate reflection of his public image as the Sun King. An important quantity of statuary representing classical themes was ordered in 1674 by Louis XIV to embellish the parterres, and in the same year the king ordered the addition to the Grand Canal called Little Venice where gondolas and decorative boats were docked to serve the pleasures of the Court. Louis XIV’s strongest ally, Apollo (the Greek Sun-god or God of Light), is represented in fountains and grottos and statuary throughout the garden to allude to the king’s omnipresence.

The mastermind behind this colossal project was André Le Nôtre. The king himself poured over the plans. Careful and strategic planning was required to create a garden that was at once opulent, in phase with the palace, able to reveal and dissimulate through nature so that discovery of the garden became an adventure and a distraction in itself, all the while speaking of the power and glory of Louis XIV.

The foundation of André Le Nôtre’s creation was shear manpower; millions of men, regiments even, were involved in transforming the landscape and diverting water here. Chariots and wheelbarrows containing countless tons of earth were required to transform the prairies and swamp land which originally constituted the Domain of Versailles. Trees were brought to Versailles from all over France to stabilize and maintain this earthly base, transforming flatlands into hilled woodland. Andre Le Nôtre worked with subtlety and mathematical know-how, tried and tested at the Tuileries Gardens and Vaux-le-Vicomte, to create illusions of perspective which evolve as the garden unfolds.

André Le Nôtre’s genius is particularly evident in the walls of the Sun King’s “outdoor palace.” Masses of hedges form bosquets, behind which follies and fountains reveal themselves like little theaters or tableaux vivants. Walking through the gardens, one is struck by the density and size of these thickets and the quantity of trellis work that prevents the untamed forest areas from invading the paths. While providing shade, these geometrically trimmed vegetal walls protect from wind and give shelter to birds and small wildlife. It is interesting to notice today that the areas of the garden that are in the process of being replanted are initially delimited by trellis work, as if the first step in the garden’s construction.

André Le Nôtre did not content himself with the construction of just one wall, however; there are walls within walls. The bosquets are often doubled with a second wall of vegetation, trimmed and adorned with statuary which offers heightened visual complexity and a shady path. The final flourish is a third row of topiary statues, notably along the east-west axis extending from the palace to the Grand Canal and the north-south axis leading to Neptune’s Basin. Nature in this case, serves a decorative rather than functional purpose, heralded by white marble or dark stone statuary providing contrast in texture and color to the pervasive green of the garden.

This is the orderly representation of the Garden of Versailles, where nature is trimmed (they cut the topiary statues using life-size cardboard models for accuracy), trained, maintained. This is also a visually unstructured aspect of André Le Nôtre’s garden architecture which is demonstrated in the King’s Garden: here an aboretum coexists in harmony and color with low topiary hedges and grassy lawns. The trees act like a bosquet, preventing the viewer from seeing out beyond his immediate surroundings, while providing shelter from wind.

The Park of Versailles begins past the Apollo Fountain and beyond the wrought iron gates that delimit the Garden of Versailles. If the Garden of Versailles is Louis XIV’s outdoor palace, the park—which includes forests, fields and the gardens of the Trianon Palaces—can be seen as the garden of the Garden, in that it is just as carefully maintained and planned in its “wooded” form as the former is in its “constructed” form.

Walking past the garden gates one leaves beyond the imposing formality of the Garden of Versailles to visit the Grand and Petit Trianons and their respective gardens and beyond the Petit Trianon to the Queen’s Hamlet, a quaint working farm as desired by Marie-Antoinette. These gardens are exceptionally charming because they are smaller in size and scope as well as being less formal and more romantic, making them a treat for any photographer willing to venture beyond the crowds.

While André Le Nôtre successfully built Louis XIV’s garden to reflect the king’s power and to capture the attention of the masses, I don’t believe that he could have imagined in his wildest dreams that this glorious place would attract some many visitors for many years to come. Yet the garden still manages to conquer in splendor. Now, if only they would replace the golf carts and tourist “trains” with Apollo’s chariots and horses.

Text and images © Elise Prudhomme.

A Philadelphia-born photographer living in Paris since 1990, Elise Prudhomme developed a passion for photography during university years at Smith College. In addition to her own photography, she directs Studio Galerie B&B, an art gallery, photo studio, darkroom facility and digital imaging center in Paris, 6 bis rue des Récollets, near Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. More images can been seen at www.eliseprudhomme.com.

Also see Elise’s text and images concerning the Tuileries Garden.

The post Yours, Mine, Le Nôtre’s: An American Photographer Examines the Garden of Versailles appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

France Revisited joins in the celebration with a series of photo reports by Elise Prudhomme, a longtime resident of Paris, beginning with seven stunning black-and-white images of the Tuileries Garden, Paris’s most historical garden.

It was here, behind the royal palace of the Tuileries, that André Le Nôtre cut his teeth as a landscape gardener. His father and grandfather had worked here before him, he lived within the garden walls, and he is buried nearby in Saint Roch Church.

These Tuileries photographs are accompanied by a text in which the photographer provides background about Le Nôtre and explains her photographic interest in this garden.

Le tien, le mien, Le Nôtre / Yours, Mine, Le Nôtre’s

Photographs and text by Elise Prudhomme

A walk through the Tuileries Garden is a return to the origin of French gardens. Considering its long heritage of transformations by queens, kings, landscape architects and gardeners, the Tuileries cannot be fully attributed to André Le Nôtre (1613-1700). It can nevertheless be viewed as the matrix of André Le Nôtre’s career. By matrix I mean that the Tuileries was his testing grounds and the precursor of his future projects, the womb or mold from which his future work originated and developed.  Without the Tuileries there would be no Versailles.

Le Nôtre was born near these royal gardens in the Saint Roc Quarter. He was baptized and would eventually be buried in the St. Roch Church.  For many years he lived with his family in a house inside the walls of the Tuileries Garden. This garden was a family affair. His grandfather Pierre Le Nôtre was in charge of the parterres for Catherine de Medici, who had built the Tuileries Palace. His father Jean Le Nôtre replanted and maintained the Tuileries for Henri IV. (The Tuileries Palace itself, begun in 1564, burned down in 1871, leaving its garden to appear as though directly connected to the Louvre.)

The Tuileries appears to rest on the pillars of its historical central axis running through the garden and out west to what would become the Champs-Elysées and the geometrical work of the basins, but as a photographer these are not the aspects that most interest me here. My eye is drawn instead to the groundmass that constitutes the garden, actually a series of gardens within the larger garden.

Le Nôtre made innovative and subtle changes to the notion of space, opening what was once a medieval walled garden towards the exterior, creating gardens within gardens (these developed into bosquets at Versailles), changing the form of the parterres (octagonal to trapezoidal) for visual complexity, and constructing the elevated terraces (including the fer à cheval [horseshoe] ramps) which provided the viewer with different heights from which to contemplate the garden.

André Le Nôtre sought to break with the early formalism of French gardens in order to render the space appreciable to visitors. Working with mineral and plant architecture, he created multifaceted gardens that are both majestic and playful. The introduction of great vistas allowed him to play with symmetry and geometry in order to create complexity and diversity that open the garden to various functions, to areas of ornamentation (though there were fewer statues at the time), pleasure and utility (though commercial utility was far from Le Nôtre’s intent).

While crowds of pressed visitors are naturally drawn by the dramatic perspective from the Louvre up the Champs-Elysées, the Tuileries also allows strollers the opportunity to discover smaller gardens within the garden.

Photographing these individual spaces like the pieces of a puzzle, I wished to form a notion of the whole through the assimilation of individual details. Working spontaneously, I visited the garden frequently and photographed a variety of subjects. The choice to work in black and white was made to better reveal the geometry and rhythm that nature and humans have brought to these places.

Text and images © Elise Prudhomme.

A Philadelphia-born photographer living in Paris since 1990, Elise Prudhomme developed a passion for photography during university years at Smith College.  She also directs Studio Galerie B&B, an art gallery, photo studio, darkroom facility and digital imaging center in Paris, 6 bis rue des Récollets, near Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. More images can been seen at www.eliseprudhomme.com.

Thirty photographs from Elise Prudhomme’s Tuileries series Le tien, le mien, Le Nôtre (Yours, Mine, Le Nôtre’s) were accepted by the Louvre to grace the walls of their reception tent in the Tuileries Garden during the 2013 Jardins Jardin festival.

The post Celebrating Le Nôtre: An American Photographer Explores the Tuileries Garden appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

There’s a certain kind of cyclist who thinks of himself as such an independent urbanite that he doesn’t have to pay attention to traffic regulations. He breezes through red lights with a ting-ting of his bell to let pedestrians know that he’s too free, too green and too self-sufficient to have to have to stop for them.

And the haphazard way in which he locks up his two-wheels to posts and fences is reminiscent of how car owners parked on the sidewalk before the crackdown (and posts) circa 1990. Except that the car owners would eventually move their rusting vehicles, whereas cyclists will leave their bikes agonizing on the street for all to see. Admittedly, some of those bikes have been vandalized—their seat or a wheel stolen, their wheel run over by a car or twisted by intentional fate, etc.—and are then abandoned by their owners.

Still, fed up with the sight of bicycles that no longer roam, that agonize before our eyes, that clutter the sidewalks, Va-nu-pieds says: “Ras le bol de ces vélos qui ne roulent pas, qui expirent sous nos yeux, qui encombrent tout….” as he lifts his camera and his foot to rant.

All photos © 2013, Va-nu-pieds

Also see The Cranky Parent, The Cranky Host, The Cranky Urbanist and The Cranky Foreign Resident.

The post The Cranky Pedestrian: The Barefoot Photographer Rants Against Bicycle Cadavers appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Never mind.

He went window shopping instead.

Imagine his surprise when he came upon a shop that sold leather accessories for the feet.

What an odd concept he thought, and he took a picture.

If he were to accessorize at all he might shop at this digit decorating shop:

But they wouldn’t allow him inside either.

So he stepped into a world where shoes weren’t required,

and from there he sent us these photographs with best wishes for merry trekking and travels in the coming year.

The post Va-nu-pieds, the Barefoot Photographer, Goes Christmas Shoe Shopping in Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Is that student the last to leave the classroom during an exam? Is he being kept back for extra study? Has he fallen asleep? Is he secretly texting? Sexting? Has he solicited his teacher’s assistance only to find himself given a problem to solve while his teacher photographs his foot?

Whatever’s going on here, un grand merci to Va-nu-pieds for getting us back in the saddle of the classroom as the new school year gets underway.

If interested in the big picture of how the education system operates in France, a round-up in English from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining the 60 billion euro system can be found here.

The post Va-nu-pieds: Barefoot in the Classroom appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

About 100 feet in front of the cathedral there’s an octagonal plaque engraved with a compass and surrounded by four stones engraved with the words POINT ZÉRO DES ROUTES DE FRANCE. Even when the crowds arrive few will notice this bronze plaque indicating the point from which all roads from the capital are measured. Perhaps one hasn’t truly been to the center of Paris if one hasn’t put a foot—barefoot, shoed, sneakered or sandaled—on Point Zero, a.k.a. Kilometer Zero. It’s a kind of “You are here”—“Vous êtes ici.”

Va-nu-pieds was there. Pausing to reflect on what direction he’ll go in for his summer travels, the Barefoot Photographer steps up to the plate.

Photos © 2012, Va-nu-pieds.
Text by Gary Lee Kraut.

More of Va-nu-pieds’ work can be seen here on France Revisited and here on the photographer’s own site.

The post Va-nu-pieds: Notre-Dame, Early Morning and Point Zero, Early Summer appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

The festival, which takes places through the month of April, reveals a diversity of approaches to travel and place—poetic, harsh, intimate, imaginary, mysterious, playful—by French photographers who collectively present far-flung “itineraries” from Bordeaux to Tokyo to Africa to South America.

Their work is shown in thirteen venues spread throughout Bordeaux (museums, galleries, garden gates, public spaces), with most of the venues being devoted to the work of individual photographers. Entrance to all venues is free.

Among the photographers for the festival’s 2012 edition are:

Sophie Chausse, who returns to her native Gabon 20 years after leaving the country:

Cyrus Cornet, who takes an “antivoyage” into the French suburbs:

Damien Guillaume, who brought back still-life images from travels in South America:

Christopher Héry, who photographed individuals encountered in Nigeria:

Pascal Ken, who presents images of seven days in Tokyo:

Julien Lombardi, who examines a city’s potential for drift, whether natural, uncontrolled or dangerous:

Thibault de Puyfontaine, whose “Late Colors,” images from Egypt and Mozambique, were shown in Paris in 2011, as described at the time on France Revisited:

Kristine Thiemann, who presents a playful vision of Bordeaux’s Benauge quarter:

Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs, Bordeaux, an annual festival of travel photography taking place in April. For more information see www.itiphoto.com.

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The portraits in this show were created with the wet plate collodion process, a photographic technique developed in the 1850s that corresponds well with what Jacobson calls his “preoccupation with otherness.”

That preoccupation was more apparent in the haunting portraits presented in his 2010 show “Glass Memories” at Centre Iris, just north of the Pompidou Center (see map below), based on the same process.

In “The American West Portraits” the otherness is less in the foreground, less in-your-face. Perhaps that’s because while “Glass Memories” was partially realized in Germany, where Jacobson, originally from Ogden, Utah, had expatriated himself and his family from 2006 to 2011, “The American West Portraits” reflect a homecoming.

Last year the photographer left Viernheim (Hesse), Germany and moved to Denver, a city he says he selected among a hatfull of western cities.

During an interview prior to the March 14 opening of the new show, Jacobson said along with the culture shock of returning to the U.S. after five years in Europe he was struck the diversity of people in Denver.

While French viewers are undoubtedly drawn to the exoticism of the American West, not only because of distance but because nation-building through frontier settlement has no equivalent on European soil, American viewers will find some familiarity in these new portraits; we recognize in them characters from the 19th-century western town of our own imagination, circa 1876, say, the year Colorado joined the Union.

The wet plate collodion process results in singular images on either glass (ambrotype) or metal (alumitype or ferrotype). Created with a 150-year-old technique, these brownish-grey portraits naturally give the impression that the subjects lived in another era. That impression is reinforced by Jacobson’s eye for and attraction to individuals on “the fringe of society.”

Another factor may well be at play: whether on the fringes or in the center, society—in this case Denver society—is undoubtedly formed of many of the same elements in 2011 as it was in 1876.

This, for example, could be the portrait of a cattle rancher come to town on business, though the title reads “Cannabis farmer”:

This could certainly be a character from post-Gold Rush Denver:

This could be an outcast in any age, or perhaps a man on his way to the gallows:

Sitting for portraits, Jacobson says, his subject do indeed imagine themselves in 19th century photography and positions, such as a fiddler holding his instrument like a rifle. Strangely, it’s only a blind woman who is clearly from a more recent area due to the fluffy light-colored blouse she’s worn for her portrait. Otherwise, the portraits can be transposed to the Wild West, even if their titles clearly place them in the present, such as “Rap promoter” or “Jewish punk rocker.”

Kyleigh, who seems to be one of Jacobson’s muses in this recent work, appears several times in this exhibition. Drawn down by dreadlocks, her gaze, having been held still for a full six seconds to fix the image, could be either that of a turn-of-this-century middle-class child gone Rasta in rebellion or that of the 19th-century daughter of a Scottish settler and an American Indian. Either way she appears to be waiting to discover who she is or who she wants to be. The largest of her portraits is hung at the far end of this basement gallery, as though at the focal point of a grotto chapel.

The basement exhibition space is well adapted to Jacobson’s work and their appearance of found artifacts of another era.

Quinn Jacobson gave a demonstration of the collodion technique prior to the opening and will be giving other workshops and photographing individuals at times during the run of the show (see schedule below). Watching him prepare his subject, introduce plates, count the seconds of posing time, pull out vials of his chemical mixtures, pour liquids onto the plates, and heat them to the point of nearly burning his fingers, comment on the serendipitous nature of the technique, and hearing him tell how he came to love one of his glass plate portraits that had been accidently shattered to many pieces that were then put together, it is clear that Jacobson is not a point and shoot kind of guy.

He cites the visual, olfactory and tactile aspects of the process as elements that can “reengage people with the craft of photography” and bring about “the personal connection that’s missing today.

He nevertheless willingly allowed this writer to photograph him in instant pixels.

From collodion to daguerreotype

With this show, Jacobson brings an end to his personal evolution in working with the collodion process.

“After ten years in collodion I have nothing more to say about it [in my work],” he said. “It’s run its course.”

His interest has now turned 15 years further back in the history of photography to daguerreotypes, named for Frenchman Louis Daguerre, who perfected his technique in 1839.

Since 2010 Jacobson has been working increasingly with in “authentic mercurial daguerreotype” and will largely devote himself to that for the foreseeable future.

In 2014, the 175th anniversary of the year Daguerre perfected his technique, the Centre Iris will be hosting a show of Jacobson’s daguerreotypes. The gallery is just half a mile from the site of the laboratory where Daguerre developed his technique by what is now Place de la République, as indicated on this plaque.

“The American West Portraits” by Quinn Jacobson at the Centre Iris pour la photographie, March 15 to June 19, 2012. 238 rue Saint-Martin, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Arts et Métiers. Tel. 01 48 7 06 09. Open Tues.-Sat. 2-7 p.m. Free admission. Prices of these single-sample works run from 600 to 5000 euros.

Quin Jacobson’s Workshops: Jacobson is running five 2-day workshops in English initiating participants in the wet collodion process on March 19 and 20, March 21 and 22, May 30 and 31, June 5 and 6, and June 7 and 8, 650-725€ per person. Contact Centre Iris for more information.

Back in Denver he gives workshops at the Colorado Photographic Art Center.

Your collodion portrait: Individuals can have Quinn Jacobson create their own one-of-a-kind collodion portraits—“handmade artifacts,” he calls them—on glass or metal by signing up in advance for a 30-minute photo session on March 13, 15, 16 and 17, May 29, June 4 and 9. Cost 160-235€ depending on size.

Explaining the wet plate collodion process: Jacobson explains the process, followed by a video demonstration here.

Quinn Jacobson’s website: Studio Q.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Quinn Jacobson’s American West Portraits in Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

“From the deep, narrow creeks (calanques) of Marseille to Saint Tropez,” VNP writes, “the Riviera is magical for me. The light of September, the colors, the smell of pine and eucalyptus, the ground of the coast and of the beaches.”

Des calanques de Marseille à Saint Tropez, la côte d’Azur est pour moi un enchantement. La lumière de septembre, les couleurs, les odeurs de pin et d’eucalyptus, les sols de la côte et des plages.

Sun/Soleil

“Shooting pictures in the south of France in black-and-white is a challenge when everything here is golden, blue and green, reflection and transparency…”

C’est une gageure de photographier le Midi en noir et blanc quand ici tout est doré, bleu et vert, de reflets et de transparences…

Rocks/Rochers

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Water/Eau

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– Photos and text (c) VNP, September 2011

For more of Va-nu-pieds’ photographs on France Revisited click here.
For Va-nu-pieds’ photographs on his own blog click here.

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