On the triple occasion of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, an exhibition of Ian Patrick’s portraits of Normandy veterans at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris, and the publication of the expanded second edition of D-Day Portraits: Héros Anonymes – Anonymous Heroes, his collection of portraits and first-hand accounts of veterans of the Invasion of Normandy who have returned over the years, I sat down with Ian to discuss his relationship with Normandy, with WWII veterans, and with the veteran who first awakened his interest in the “anonymous heroes” of the invasion that changed the course of the war: his father.

Ian Patrick is an American-born photographer, now a dual citizen, who moved to Paris in 1979 after launching a successful career as a portraitist in New York, where he photographed such well-known cultural figures of the time as Bob Marley and Andy Warhol, among others. It wasn’t until Ian was living in France that his father, William Patrick, when visiting, told him that he had taken part in the Invasion of Normandy 1944. Together, in 1980, they visited Utah Beach, where his father had landed six days after D-Day. Since then, Ian has returned frequently to the D-Day Landing Zone to photograph veterans of the Invasion of Normandy. With the disappearance of the generation that fought in the Second World War, his 44-year project of photographing veterans is coming to an end.

What do you remember of the first time you visited the D-Day Landing Zone?

It was 1979. I’d done a photography job in La Rochelle, and since my assistant and I weren’t in a rush to get the car back to Paris, we drove up the Atlantic coast and cut across to Normandy. I remember seeing the sign for Omaha Beach and driving down to the beach and saying, “Well, there’s nothing here!” We drove up and down the beach a couple times, unimpressed, and then went up to the cemetery where we got the jaw-drop view of the tombs and the channel beyond the cliff. But we didn’t spend much time in the area because we had to get back to Paris.

Then the next time you went back was with your father?

Yes. In 1980. My father flew over on a military plane, which he could do for free as a career military man. He flew from California to Dover, Delaware, from Dover to the Azores, from the Azores to Ramstein, Germany. Then he took the train to Paris, Gare de l’Est, and walked over to our apartment by the canal [Saint-Martin]. Sometimes he’d just show up, without letting us know he was coming. But this time we knew he was coming because he wanted to meet Véronique, my fiancée at the time, before we got married.

After a few days in Paris, he was bored and he said, “How about taking me up to Normandy?” And I said, “Sure, Dad, but if it’s Calvados [apple brandy] you want we can get it in Paris.” And he said, “Yeh, I’d like some Calvados, too, but I’d like to visit Normandy because I was there in the war.” I said, “You never told me about that.” He said, “Well, let’s go up there and I’ll tell you all about it.”

At the time I had a “Quatrelle,” one of those funky little Renault cars, that wasn’t exactly a bomb on the road. Dad didn’t want to go on the freeway but on the smaller national roads because he figured he’d recognize all kinds of stuff. As soon as we got into Normandy, which you do fairly quickly from Paris, he started noticing signs for Calvados and he asked me why were there so many of them. I told him that there are lots of farmers who make and sell Calvados. He said, “Let’s go get some.” We were still two hours from the beach. We went into one, where I introduced my father and told the farmer that he wanted to try some Calvados. The farmer said, “Here’s 7 years, 10 years, 15 years.” My father said, “Let’s start with the 10 years.” He tasted it and he said, “My god, this is so much better than the stuff we had during the war. Get three bottles of that.” I said, “Three bottles, Dad?” He said, “Yeh, one for you, one for me, and one for right now.”

So we started drinking it at 9 o’clock in the morning and by the time we got to Utah Beach, we were feeling “in our cups,” as they used to say, and he started talking to me about his time in the war. He landed at Utah Beach on June 12, so the beach had been won by then, of course, but there were still corpses around. My father had started off the war as a pilot but blew his eardrums out, so they put him on the ground, which he was really disappointed about. He was an armorer, making sure that guns were perfectly in alignment and worked and the bombs properly place, anything to do with ammunition. They had a special place on the airstrip where they could lift the tail up and fire at targets to make sure that the guns were aligned correctly. What’s incredible is that they actually had gun cameras on those machine guns and rockets so that same evening the films were developed and they would project them in the barn of the farm where they were staying and write down what needed to be done. And they saw the carnage they were creating for the Germans.

When he arrived on the 12th, the airstrip where he was assigned, which was just behind Sainte Mère Eglise, was still being finished by the Corps of Engineers. It was being made so that their P47s wouldn’t have to go back to England to refuel and rearm. He was there until the end of August, after the Germans had been hammered in the Falaise Gap. From there he went to Le Mans, then Nancy, then Saint Dizier, and also provided support for the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. They put special pouches under the wings to drop ammunition and supplies to the men who were stuck in the Hürtgen Forest. They then moved into Germany.

I knew practically nothing of this before going to Normandy with him. I knew that he was in the war but he never talked about it. He was a career army man but he never talked about the war. I lived on army bases as a kid and saw army stuff all the time. When you’re a little kid you play army but you don’t necessarily ask your father if he ever killed any Germans or stuff like that. It was with our trip to Normandy that he started talking about it.

Why do you think it took your father so long after the war to come to Normandy given that returning there came to mean so much to him?

My parents came to Paris in 1950 on their honeymoon from Austria, where my father was stationed. My mother was already pregnant with me. I have photographs of him in his uniform at the Eiffel Tower—in those days you had to wear your uniform when you traveled. They also went to Nice. After I was born, we lived in Austria and later we lived in Germany. We’d go on vacation to the French Riviera or the Italian Riviera. They liked going to Vienna as well. But Dad never talked about the war. After we moved to the U.S., they loved coming back to Europe because they lived a long time here. But Normandy wouldn’t have been a place that he would think of going with my mother. So when he came to visit alone that time, it was an opportunity for him to go and for me to go with him. My mother had no interest in the war. But when she came with him later, she realized the effort and the massiveness of the invasion and… you can’t help, even if you’re opposed to the military and to war, you can’t help but take your hat off to those people who were a part of it and who lived through it. My parents returned may times, especially my father.

That trip with your father, to whom you dedicate “Anonymous Heroes,” your book of veterans’ portraits and their first-hand accounts, must have been the spark to your interest in photographing veterans.

Yes. We drove up and down the Utah Beach that first time. He showed me certain bunkers where he would tell me what kind of shell had hit it to make the hole or the mark on it, using all this military jargon. He was into ammunition because that was his job. Then he wanted to find the farm where the airstrip had been. Of course, the strip was no longer there, and there was no sign marking where it had been. Also, most farmers in the area didn’t want visitors. But we drove into one farm in my “Quatrelle,” where we met a lady named Alice. It was lunchtime, and she and the family came out with their napkins in their hands. “Oui, Monsieur?” she said to me. “Excusez-nous,” I said, “Mon papa est vétéran…” and right away she said to him, “Entrez, monsieur.” So we went in and they brought out two plates and we sat down to eat with them. My father was in tears, he couldn’t believe it. Their welcome was so sweet. At the end of the meal, the farmer went out to the barn, or wherever he went, and he comes back with a half-full dirty old bottle of dark alcohol, and written in chalk on the bottle was “1944.” He gave us each a little snort of it. It was absolutely delicious and my father started crying again. He said, “This isn’t the kind of stuff that we had in 1944. What we had was green rotgut, whatever we could find that the Germans left behind.” From there we went into Sainte Mère Eglise and we meet other people who then invited us in for coffee. My father couldn’t believe the welcome we were receiving. I took some pictures of him on the beach and in different places.

After that I decided to go up there every year on the sixth of June, and I would take pictures. Many times, there were no veterans at all. I would go each year, whether my father would come to France or not. Years later, I went to a fair in a hotel in Paris promoting Normandy for the upcoming 50th anniversary [1994]. By that time I’d already done a number of photographs. I met the secretary of the Comité du Débarquement [Landing Committee] and showed her some pictures. She said, “Oh c’est bien!” Then she explained that not only was she a part of the Landing Committee but she was also the director of the Musée de la Tapisserie in Bayeux, and she invited me to show my work in the Salle du Chevalier, which is the vaulted hall that later became the giftshop of the museum. So that was the first exhibition of my Normandy work, which I’d been taking just out of my own interest until then. From then on, she would send me an official invitation to the June 6th ceremonies every year so that I had actual credentials to go wherever I wanted to photograph veterans.

I also then started to interview the veterans, usually calling them on the phone after meeting them since there was no time to interview them during the ceremonies. On the phone, they would speak differently, more freely, as though to themselves, since they were alone and weren’t perturbed by my presence. Sometimes they’d go off track and I’d bring them back with another question. I asked them to tell me about their experience, whatever was bizarre or sad or happy that they wanted to recall. Most of them didn’t talk about terrible stuff. Some of the ones who landed on Omaha Beach did, in a very cold manner. A lot of them didn’t want to talk at all. I just tried to let them tell me what they wanted to tell me.

I wasn’t necessarily meeting them at the ceremonies. I would attend the big ceremonies, and I might come upon a smaller one here and there that I only learned about when I got there. Nine times out of ten it was just serendipity that brought me in contact with a veteran. I have photographed veterans I happened to come upon in the cemeteries while they’re paying homage to a particular person. I got the shot of Major Howard at Pegasus Bridge because the owner of the B&B where we were staying during the anniversary that year [1993] told us about an event that was taking place there on June 5th. So we immediately went there, and there they were, Major Howard and a few men popping Champagne. There weren’t that many people. There were no guys dressed up as paratroopers as you’d see more recently. There was just Madame Gondrée at the café by the bridge when I was in there talking with Bill Millin. Some years when there were few veterans, I would do landscapes, which is why there are some landscapes in the show and in the book, photographs of ceremonies and of places that reek with history.

In my first show for the 50th anniversary there was very little text next to the portraits. Just who they are, were they are, basic facts. Then little by little, as I took more portraits and gathered more stories, I realized that I had material for a book, which I put together with the backing of the Military Museum at the Invalides [in Paris] for the 65th anniversary in 2009. That year I also had exhibitions of my work at the Invalides and at the Museum of the Battle of Normandy in Bayeux, near the British Cemetery. That’s the first time that I put together the photos with the text [first-hand accounts] at an exhibition as well as putting them in the book.

After that first edition I continued to meet veterans, and even since completing the new edition last year I’ve met others. For example, I recently met some Belgian soldiers who managed to get to England during the war and joined up with a brigade that took part in the Invasion of Normandy under British command.

How often did your father return after that first visit?

He would come every two or every five years. He would come for the big ceremonies and some little ones as well. Even if it wasn’t the sixth of June, whenever my parents would come to France they would usually drive to Normandy, even without me.

In the early years of his visits, my father and I would be at Sainte Mère Eglise and school children would come up to him and ask him for his autograph. My father said, “Why do they want an autograph from me? I’m just an old veteran.” I had to bug him to put on his medals. He didn’t want to wear them, it embarrassed him because he thought it would be showing off. He didn’t even bring them for the 65th [2009] though I thought he might. I hadn’t told him in advance, but he was going to get the Legion of Honor at the Invalides that year along with 50 other veterans. I didn’t want to tell him before he got to France because I knew that he would be angry about getting a medal now. Finally, I told him about it when he got to France. He was kind of embarrassed. He hadn’t brought his medals, so I called my sister and asked her to dig through the drawers in his bedroom to find them and to send them asap. She did, and the day of the ceremony I pinned them on him. He complained, “Where the hell did you get those?” But he was enthralled by the whole thing, a big ceremony—he thought it was incredible. Then we all went to Normandy for the 65th anniversary commemorations. They reserved a train for the veterans, red carpet at the station, the band of the Garde Républicaine playing Glen Miller, wine and foie gras on the train. Then a bus took us from Caen to the American Cemetery. My father sat with all of the veterans on the podium, where they all shook Obama’s hand and Sarkozy’s hand. Then we all went back to Paris, exhausted.

He and my mother both passed away a year later, in 2010. They wanted their ashes spread together at Utah Beach, which we did.

Why did you want to put together a new edition of your book?

Because this could be the der des ders, the last flame. There are at least 25 additional veterans in this edition. I’ve met a lot more British and Americans but especially British through British families who live or have vacation homes in Normandy. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in Normandy over the years. The British and the Dutch get together a lot, say for a drink on a Thursday or Friday evening, and a lot of them have fathers who were veterans. So I’d meet the fathers when they came over. Many of them have become part of the Deep Respect Association, with which I’m involved. [Editor’s note: Created in 2010, Deep Respect is a Normandy-based non-profit whose mission is to preserve and transmit the memory of veterans of the Second World War who contributed to the success of Operation Overload and to help veterans who participated in the Battle of Normandy visit the region.] We take around the veterans when they visit and it’s super interesting listening to them talk about their battles.

A series of your portraits and stories from the book are now on permanent display at the Overlord Museum Ohama Beach that’s located at the round-about where one turns to enter the Normandy American Cemetery. How did that come about?

The museum houses a tremendous collection of war materials—tanks, artillery, much more—started in the 1970s by Michel Leloup. He presented some of it in a museum in Falaise but as he grew the collection he began looking for more space and for a location with potential to draw a wider audience. He died before the project to move it to the site near the American Cemetery was completed. It was opened in 2013 by his son Nicolas.

For the 70th anniversary, in 2014, I had an exhibition at the round-about at Omaha Beach where the big monuments are located. Nicolas saw the exhibition and asked if he could buy some of the photos. I said, “Sure.” He bought about five. Since the veterans in the some of the photographs were at the event, we got pictures of them with the photographs, which they signed, which helped promote the museum. Over the next few years, the museum really took off, so Nicolas decided to expand the museum to show more of the collection, and in part of it he’s now consecrated one long corridor to presenting about 70 of my photographs—a lot of which he bought and some of which I donated—along with the text of the stories the veterans told me. My daughter Leah did the scenography and the soundtrack of 40s music and various sounds (waves, planes, bombs) for the exhibition.

You’ve now been photographing veterans for 44 years. With so few Normandy veterans still with us, and very few able or willing to travel, where does your project go from here?

I’ll still see some veterans this year and possibly next. But since I am basically a portraitist, there will soon no longer be men to photograph. That means that the project is now passing into the archival stage. It’s important to show them. I want to help maintain through the show at the Invalides, the permanent exhibition at the museum and the book the memory of those who are or will soon no longer be around to share their stories first-hand. The portraits are a way of people getting to know these veterans as they were as young men and as they were when I met them.

Where to see Ian Patrick’s photographic work

– His personal website Ian Patrick Photographer.
– Permanent exhibition at the Overlord Museum, near the entrance to the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer.
– The book: Héros Anonymes – Anonymous Heroes: D-Day Portraits. The captions and first-hand accounts of veterans are in both English and French. The book is available at major museums in the Normandy Landing Zone—the Overlord Museum, the Airborne Museum in Sainte Mère Eglise, the Arromanches Museum, the Utah Beach Museum and the Pegasus Bridge Museum—as well as at the Army Museum at the Invalides in Paris. It can also be ordered directly from the author by contacting him at ianpatrickphoto@gmail.com.
– Temporary exhibition at the Army Museum at the Invalides, June 1 to August 26, 2024. The exhibition is presented under the arcades surrounding the main courtyard. Entrance is free as it isn’t necessary to purchase to museum ticket in order to enter the courtyard. 129 rue de Grenelle, Paris.

© 2024. Interview conducted by Gary Lee Kraut.
All photos © Ian Patrick.

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Paris, 4 a.m.—A couple I met this July afternoon told me how disappointed they were with a “Paris By Night” driving tour that they’d taken the previous night.

“We saw the major monuments,” they said, “but we never saw them by night.”

Apparently, year-round, the company is offering an 8 p.m. Paris By Night Tour even though night doesn’t fully descend over Paris until after 10 p.m. from late May to late July.

“The driver was nice enough to extend the tour for 20 minutes because we felt cheated,” they continued, “but we never made it past twilight.”

Twilight is known in French as “the time between dog and wolf” (l’heure entre chien et loup). On the right evening and with the right company or mindset, there’s breathtaking seduction in its deepening blue. But this couple had been looking forward to encountering full, howling wolf.

I sympathized with them for being the victims of misleading advertising, or at least of static advertising since 8-10pm would indeed have a night component nine months of the year.

I suggest that they join me for a bike ride that night.

“What time?” they asked.

“Round midnight,” I said. “Or one a.m. or two, if you truly want to know Paris by night.”

They laughed, thinking I was joking.

“Seriously,” I said. “We’ll use Vélib, the public bike share system.”

“That’s too late for us,” they said. “We want to be at Versailles first thing in the morning.”

Wanting the butter and the money for the butter (vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre) is the French expression for having one’s cake and eating it too, or in this case of experiencing Paris by night in early July without being willing to stay out past one’s usual bedtime.

Travelers touring Paris on a working-day schedule certainly get to see the museums and the monuments. They get early restaurant reservations and make all the right pastry stops. But one of the best ways to experience Paris as a living city is by assuming a wobbly schedule whereby you:

• take the streets at least once by 7am so as to appreciate the opening of cafés, markets, gardens and parks while (re)discovering the aura of old monuments before they get poked by selfie sticks,

• and stay out past midnight at least once so as to truly appreciate after-hours in the city.

I understand that taking on such a schedule is disturbing to some. (Napping helps.) Between overcoming jet lag and maintaining one’s habitual rise, dine and sleep times, an untethered program can be troubling for some, and unadvisable when traveling with children.

But for me, one of the unsung pleasures of Paris is the midnight stroll or bike ride. Make that 2 a.m. on a warm summer night. In fact, “off-the-beaten track” in such as heavily visited city as Paris isn’t a place, it’s a time — especially that time in summer when most tourists are in bed dreaming of Paris. That’s when venturesome and sleepless travelers are out living their dream.

Sometime after midnight, heading out, or home, on foot or on bike (of not too much alcohol in the bloodstream), you’ll stand or sit or walk or ride by the river.

You’ll bathe in the diffuse yellow light of the streetlamps as it plays against sidewalk, street, stone buildings and the lower leaves of chestnut, linden and turkish filbert trees. You’ll listen to or take part in street conversations.

You’ll want to feel safe, of course. In certain quarters you might have to contend with or steer clear of alcohol-fueled night-folk. But Paris is a well-lit city. It is, after all, the City of Lights.

So I went out biking that night. I meandered along the boulevards and avenues and well-lit rues, through open squares and along the banks of the river and of the canal, rediscovering the true pleasure of Paris by night as I encountered:

Brazilian salsa dancing by the Arab Institute,

a friendly game of pétanque (bocce) by the river,

the intimate end of a long picnic,

a tête-à-tête with a view,

a headless martyr,

spiders over the Seine,

a heap of garbage beside City Hall.

silent cemetery walls.

and a dance of drunken seduction after a neighborhood bar has closed.

I could go on and on.

But it’s 4am. I’m going to bed.

Text and photos © 2015, Gary Lee Kraut, except for Va-nu-pieds’ photo of Notre-Dame in the morning.

Biking Paris after midnight is one way to travel in the spirit of France Revisited.

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Place de la République, Paris, January 2015.

We were Charlie.

.

.

Who are we now?

© 2015, Gary Lee Kraut

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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.

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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.

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

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