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THE WORK BEFORE THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

Saturday, January 22, 2022

In today’s newsletter, the latest on documenting Notre Dame’s rise, using 1930s aerial images to help predict climate change’s future toll, unearthing a ‘lost city’ in Egypt … and R.I.P. photo legend Steve Schapiro.

PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEO BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE

By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences

“Notre Dame is much more than an old church,” National Geographic photographer Tomas van Houtryve told me. “It's a symbol, it's a vessel of history, and it is its own little universe full of sacred, grotesque, and graceful surfaces.”

Tomas, who has called Paris home since 2006, was the perfect photographer to document the rebuilding of Notre Dame. But his unprecedented access was not a guarantee. It took five months of steadfast persistence for the public entity to restore Notre Dame Cathedral to agree to partner with Nat Geo on the coverage.

But that was just the beginning. Toxic lead particles released during the burning of the roof and spire have contaminated the entire cathedral. Tomas was required to enroll in a lead-exposure training course. Next, he learned that a team of technicians access the hardest-to-get-to portions of the cathedral via ropes. And since Tomas also needed to access these unseen parts of the church, well, he, too, needed specialized training on these rope and harness systems, as he described in Overheard, our podcast. All of this training came before he ever took a photograph.

“It's actually very weird just showing up for a day of work at Notre Dame,” Tomas recalled. “Each time I enter the work site I need to strip off my street clothes in the locker room and don a hazmat suit and climbing helmet.” When he finished, “even my camera gear needed to be rinsed off in the shower!”

While the rope technician crews allowed him to access the exterior of the church, inside, large portions, including the nave and the crossing, remained completely off limits due to the risk of falling debris from the damaged ceiling vaults. The only access was via drone.

Flying a drone inside the fragile, 800-year-old cathedral, filled with so many precious masterpieces, is not for the faint of heart. With no GPS signal inside the cathedral, and the safety nets and scaffolding too dense to activate a drone's obstacle avoidance sensors, Tomas (shown above) had to add a carbon-fiber cage around his entire drone.

Still, Tomas had absolutely no margin for error: “I tried to fly very slowly and smoothly, imagining that I was like a disembodied spirit drifting though the heights of the cathedral.” (Below, a side chapel that was spared the damage, farther down, of the spire that crashed down on the main altar.)

The drone is just one part of Tomas’s love for technology, not all of it modern. Five years ago, Tomas bought a wooden camera, estimated to be over 160 years old, at an antique shop. To operate the camera, he learned 19th-century photographic techniques, including using wet collodion on glass plates. During his research, he found a portrait of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the architect of the ambitious 19th-century restoration of Notre Dame: The photo was taken by the photographer Nadar, using the exact photographic technique that Tomas had mastered. It seemed only fitting, then, that Tomas use his old camera to document the iconic statues (below) that Viollet-le-Duc had added to the balustrades of the bell towers during the 19th-century restoration.

“It is the very heart of Paris,” Tomas said. “And it is an immense honor to bear witness to its rebirth.”

Read our cover story on Notre Dame, from the February issue of National Geographic.

Pictured above, Tomas, atop construction scaffolding, photographs workers on the reconstruction being carried away from the cathedral’s damaged roof in a hydraulic lift.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

Learning on the job: What did one photojournalist learn from photographing 21 women voting rights activists? Originally from China, Shuran Huang said she has witnessed the debate over voting rights in her seven years working in the U.S. She included wisdom from the activists in her article for The Lily. “If you want democracy,” 13-year-old Yolanda King told her, “then go vote.”

In memoriam: In 1965, Steve Schapiro was there—alongside marchers Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, John Lewis and so many others. Schapiro was documenting the Selma-to-Montgomery march. One of the last projects that I worked on at The New Yorker, as the director of photography, was a portfolio of images from the five-day, 54-mile route, some of which Steve had recently rediscovered just prior to publication in December 2014. One of these images, a direct portrait of two young girls, just two of the many spectators who lined the route, hangs in my house—a gift from the photographer. Steve died at the age of 87 last Saturday—Dr. King’s birthday. Rest in peace. (Here’s more on his life, via Blind magazine.)

Photographic evidence: Researchers are using aerial photographs from the 1930s to determine how a changing climate has altered Norway’s Svalbard Islands, near the North Pole. Glaciers have been melting and ice thinning radically on the islands, which are warming seven times as much as the global average. The black-and-white images from mapping expeditions are informing computer modeling of how fast ice will retreat, the New York Times reports.

Hippos can smell you from afar: That’s why you need camera traps for certain close-ups of the world’s second-biggest land animal. (The elephant is No. 1.) So says photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Thomas Peschak in this can’t-look-away TikTok video from Mozambique.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY @PAOLOVERZONE

Gentle, but firm: That’s the tone used by the coordinator of an excavation team (pictured above, at center) on a dig in Egypt’s Luxor region. He “was like an orchestra director and had skills that I’ve rarely seen before … never shouting but guiding them with firm signs and voice in harmony,” said photographer Paolo Verzone, who was tagging along for a Nat Geo assignment. Like a ship captain, the coordinator focused on improvements on unearthing parts of a lost city—without losing the team’s pace and rhythm. Verzone was enthralled. “I felt a real connection,” he said, “between them and the workers of the past centuries or even more.”

LAST GLIMPSE

PHOTOGRAPH BY SISSE BRIMBERG

The photographer has arrived: Sisse Brimberg, who made this image of two people tossing a football in Montreal, was a Nat Geo contributing photographer for 40 years. “She often has unique compositions, like this photo that obscures the faces of those being photographed,” says Sara Manco, Nat Geo’s senior photo archivist. Despite her expertise, Brimberg encountered sexist slights. “And when will your photographer arrive?” Brimberg once heard after lugging half a dozen cases of lighting equipment through a museum in preparation for shooting artifacts. Her terse reply: “She has arrived.”

Related: Nat Geo photography through the eyes of women

SEE VINTAGE PHOTOS

This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Monica Williams, and Jen Tse. Have an idea or a link? We’d love to hear from you at [email protected].

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