Here are some photos I took of the apartment where we stayed. The apartment was at Number 6, Rue St. Louis en L’Ile. This was an outstanding choice of location and of apartment. It had charm, convenience, and comfort. The bedrooms were a touch petite, but it was never a problem. I would stay there again in a heartbeat. Our landlady, Francoise, was super charming and met us the day we arrived with a bottle of wine and a plate of cheeses she bought down the street at the fromagerie.
I was utterly charmed by the arrangement of this little velvet-covered chair in the dining room, next to the Chinese style sideboard.
Chair, Dining Room Window
The living room featured a chaise lounge by Le Corbusier. I suspect it is an original, based on the wear on the cowhide cover.
Le Corbusier Chaise, Living Room
Looking out the living room window, this is the view when you look straight out.
Window, Number 6, Rue St Louis en L’Ile
Looking up the street on a sunny day:
Rue St. Louis in the Sun
And on a rainy day:
Rue St. Louis in the Rain
The Rue St. Louis is very busy with pedestrians all day, although it may not look as such down at my end of the street. A block further up is where the shops, art galleries, restaurants and food sellers begin.
This archway was directly across the street from our apartment, where the Rue St. Louis took a right turn to go out to the quay.
Archway, Rue St. Louis
Even though it was raining, I stepped out on the balcony and looked down, to see this scene of the woman with red pants crossing the street:
Woman Crossing Rue St. Louis in the Rain
Here is the Eglise St. Louis en L’Ile with its clock, up close, which you can see in the background of the sunny and rainy shots of the Rue St. Louis:
Eglise St Louis En L’Ile
The église St. Louis has a gorgeous baroque interior replete with dark wood paneling, stained glass, and surprisingly enough magnificent altarpieces that somehow managed to survive the upheaval of the French Revolution. They regularly have concerts there as well as services, and it is well worth popping in if you’re passing by.
The Ilot Vache restaurant is on the corner of the Rue St.Louis en l’Ile and the Rue des Deux Ponts, which more or less bisects the Ile St. Louis into east and west halves. The Ile St. Louis was once actually two separate islands, one of which was the Ilot Vache (little cow island) because it was used as pastureland for Parisian cows. With the rapid growth of the city’s population in the 15th century, there was such a demand for more prime real estate that the two islands were merged into one and developed as residential space. Thus the name of the restaurant. The Rue des Deux Ponts roughly demarcates where the two islands were split. My dad and I ate dinner at L’Ilot Vache one night, and the food was quite good, even if the dining room was a bit crowded.
L’Ilot Vache Restaurant
I managed to catch a pair of diners in the window of the restaurant.
Diners, L’Ilot Vache, Night
This is one case where I broke my normal rule of shooting night photos with Portra 160 – these two were done on Ektar 100. I suspect that I had just a couple frames left on the roll of Ektar that was loaded in the camera when I set out to do my night shots, so I finished them off and then switched over to Portra for the rest of the evening.
Ok, it’s far from a comprehensive survey of the city by night, but whaddya want, I only had a single night for night shooting, so I confined myself to where I could walk to from my apartment.
One of the great things about where we (my father and I) stayed was the fact we were in walking distance of just about everything, from the subway to all the historical buildings and neighborhoods. Notre Dame was a stone’s throw away, across the bridge. Here is the rear view from the approach I took over the Pont St. Louis.
Notre Dame, Rear View, Night
The front facade is fully illuminated at night, and they have built a set of large risers in the plaza in front that if nothing else serve as a great camera platform for photographing the towers. The night I was out shooting was the night of the full moon, so I got lucky and was able to get this shot of the tower and the moon.
Notre Dame, Tower, Full Moon
Another view of the towers, from a side street. It had been raining that evening, so the streets were wet giving them that Hollywood movie look.
Notre Dame, Side Street, Night
Another shot of the full moon, over a grand Hotel (Hotel in the Parisian sense of grand city residence/townhouse as opposed to place-where-you-rent-a-room-by-the-night) on the Ile de la Cite.
Full Moon Over Hotel, Ile de la Cite
The Pont St. Louis, slick with rain. This is the bridge that connects the Ile St. Louis with the Ile de la Cite.
Pont St. Louis, Night
A view of the Hotel de Ville (Paris’ City Hall) from across the Seine. The white line at the river level is created by the lights of a passing river tour boat that has flood lights on the roof to illuminate the buildings on the quays as it passes. I don’t envy the people whose apartments face the river because of that, even if the boat tours do stop sometime between 9 and 10 pm.
Hotel de Ville, Seine, Night
Another view of the bridges across the Seine. In the background on the left you can see a rather castle-like building which is La Monnaie, the old French Mint where they used to make coins.
Seine Bridges, La Monnaie, Night
The last bridge of today’s program is the Pont Louis Phillippe, which connects the end of the Ile St. Louis to the north bank of the Seine. The bridge I used every day to get to and from the subway was the Pont Marie, which abuts the middle of the Ile St. Louis. I wanted to get a view of the bridges from water level, so I went down a set of steps on the quayside of the Ile de la Cite and set up my tripod at the very bottom – you can see from the facing set of steps they descend all the way into the water (I did not test how far down they go, as I had no desire to get wet, especially at this time of year).
Pont Louis Phillippe, Steps, Night
The St. Regis cafe has a view of the Pont St. Louis. Notre Dame itself is hidden by the buildings across the bridge. On my excursion, I saw people sitting outside the cafe all evening – I returned home at nearly midnight and there were people still outside the cafe as it was closing up.
St. Regis Cafe, Night
Here’s a look into the courtyard of one of the hotels on the Rue St. Louis en l’Ile, at number 51. I looked through the doorway, which had always been closed when I walked by in the daytime, and saw the light on in the library window on the second floor, and I just had to take that picture. I love libraries (I’m sitting in one as I type this, my modest personal library of 2000 or so books), so seeing in to one had a rather Proustian effect on me.
Hotel Courtyard, 51 Rue St. Louis en L’Ile, Night
I shot all these on Kodak Portra 160 because I like how it responds to nighttime color better than Ektar. It has a less contrasty look which is good for night because night scenes are inherently contrastier than daytime scenes, and it handles overexposure better than Ektar.
Here are a few more photos from Chalon-sur-Saone. The Niepce monument is the marker of the reason I took the trip in the first place – to visit the birthplace of photography. Nicephore Niepce invented the first successful photographic process, Heliography, in the mid 1820s. One reason most people haven’t heard of it and have never seen a photograph made by this process is that due to the extreme insensitivity to light of the chemicals, a single exposure required HOURS to record an image which ruled it out for photographing any non-static subject, like people, animals, or even plants, and it made photographing buildings difficult as well. In the early 1830s up until his death in 1833, he collaborated with Louis Daguerre, the net result of which was the publication of the Daguerreotype process in 1839.
Niepce Monument, Chalon
This statue of Laocoon, an ancient Greek mythological figure of a priest who warned the Trojans against admitting the wooden horse into the city, and was punished by he and his sons being devoured by sea serpents (for various reasons by various deities, depending on which version of his story you read). He’s also credited with the phrase “beware of Greeks, bearing gifts”. It’s a bit of odd statuary to find in a random courtyard around the corner from the Niepce Museum in Chalon, but there it is.
Laocoon, Courtyard, Chalon
In the same courtyard as the Laocoon statue, there was this iron plant stand in front of the stairs to a second-floor doctor’s office.
Stairs, Planter, Courtyard, Chalon
This is the basilica in Chalon. In significant architectural contrast to the old cathedral (which has parts dating back to the 7th century, and abuts the Roman walls of the town), this is clearly a 17th century structure. I peeked inside and the stained glass is very modern, like the lower windows at Notre Dame, but even more drab – greens and yellows and clear glass, and in desperate need of a cleaning from the outside. The light fixtures on the plaza are quite new and part of an effort to reinvigorate the downtown area. If you look carefully at them, at around the 12 foot mark, you’ll see metal disks protruding that serve as anti-climbing devices.
Here are businesses and storefronts in Chalon-sur-Saone.
The old advertisement still visible on the wall of the building is on a street leading away from the old (2nd-16th Century) core of the town. Just around the corner is a McDonalds, with view camera designs etched in the windows. Even if the rest of the world doesn’t know it, the Chalonnais certainly remember what portion of their heritage is related to photography.
Old Advertisements, Chalon
After spending ten days in Barcelona a few years ago, I became highly attuned to Art Nouveau architecture. Although Chalon is not particularly close to Barcelona (or Paris or any other major center for European architecture in the 19th century) the facade of this building is a particularly striking example of Noucentisme.
16 Blvd de la Republique, Chalon
Walking the streets of Chalon, you can tell that the town has had better days, but it is by no means a dying town, as can be seen from the businesses on the streets of the city center.
This boulangerie (bakery) was always busy whenever I walked past.
Boulangerie, Chalon
This fishmongers’ had particularly appealing plates of fresh seafood in their display cases.
Poissonierre, Chalon
The Bar A Vin is located on the main square across from the cathedral. If things look particularly quiet, bear in mind I was there on a weekday, in the middle of the afternoon between lunch and dinner, and it was raining.
Bar A Vin, Chalon
The lamp store was on another corner of the square and had the cutest little pig sign out front. The glow from all the lamps inside was enough to make it easy to balance the exposure between inside and outside.
Lamp Store, Chalon
What photo essay about Chalon-sur-Saone could be complete without photos of things related to photography? Here is a photo studio in the center of the medieval district, and the 4-screen movie theater.
Some more transportation photos. In France, they have the national rail network, which has two grades of TGV-class trains: the long-distance, high speed trains (the one that goes from Paris to Marseilles in 3 hours) and the not-so-fast trains that stop more places. They also have regional trains that connect the smaller cities and larger towns, and then around Paris there are the RER trains that run on a separate set of tracks from the Metro, but it interfaces with and extends the Metro network.
You’ve already seen my TGV photos. Here is one of the regional trains at the station in Chalon, on the Burgundy province network.
Wouldn’t it be cool to commute on a train like that every day?
Here’s another view of that train, from the platform at Chalon. You can see the name of the station on the sign under the awning over the platform.
Although not specifically depicting trains, I had to include this shot here, as it was in plain view from the platform of the Dijon rail station. If you watched tv in the US between the 1970s to 1990s, this will probably tickle your funny bone.
Finally, two more transportation images that have nothing whatsoever to do with trains, but instead are bicycle related. France is bike-infatuated, after all it is the home of the Tour De France. Will this be the new look on next year’s Tour?
Some would say cycling shorts can’t go away fast enough as a fashion piece; I think they should stay, as they prevent both chafing and blindness.
A very different take on bike-based transportation is this, spotted at the plaza in front of Notre Dame:
A very different, less aerodynamic sense of fashion dominates this cyclists ensemble. Equal risk of putting out someone’s eye, but from a totally different cause.
There is now a viewing platform in the square in front of Notre Dame which makes for a great venue to watch the fire spinners and other street performers, and a nice vantage point to view the facade, but it does present an unique challenge for photographing the entire building – you can’t get far enough back to get the whole facade including the towers in one frame without using an extreme wide-angle lens and introducing lots of distortion. So second-best option was this – shoot in two frames and line them up. It ALMOST worked, but you still get some keystoning from having to shoot up to get the towers.
Just a quick one-off of a very red, vibrant fire hydrant in Chalon-sur-Saone. It fits well within my series of ordinary objects, and it has a very sculptural quality to it.
We’ll start with the Louvre museum. Here are some photos of the building itself. The Pyramid, the glass entrance structure that opens to the underground entrance lobby, is fascinating in itself for the geometry it creates and the possibilities for abstraction, and for the clash of modernity against 18th and 19th century architectural sensibilities that hallmark the rest of the building.
The Pyramid, from belowPyramid, Boy
Under the pyramid there is a vast entrance plaza with a huge spiral stairs. In the center of the spiral stairs is the accessibility elevator, a cylinder that rises and falls to transport people to and from the plaza above, and looks like it should be a stage set from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Spiral Stair, Under the Pyramid
The contrast, a Napoleonic-era entrance ramp and doors (see the N’s in the frieze above the windows and doors). This is empty because the courtyard is closed to the public and filled with construction equipment.
Courtyard, Louvre
As you can see, the Louvre is a VERY busy museum. I don’t know if it is the most visited art museum in the world or not (I think it is), but it also has to be one of the largest if not the largest. I really only saw parts of one wing of the museum (there are three), and you could easily spend a half a day in there every day for a month and still not see everything.
The Grand GalleryVisitors, Napoleon crowns Josephine
The grand gallery is where the Italian Renaissance masterworks are held – the three non-Mona Lisa DaVincis are here, along with the Caravaggios – highlights of the collection that most interested me.
In the section with the 19th century French paintings, there was a painter with his easel set up, copying the famous painting of the cavalryman in the bearskin hat. I couldn’t resist taking this shot as much because of the “no photography” sign he had on his easel. I’ll justify it by saying that I think it had more to do with not wanting to be disturbed by flashes popping than anything else.
Copyist, Louvre
The Louvre has perhaps the very best collection of Michelangelo’s sculpture outside of Italy. Two of the Medici tomb sculptures are in the sculpture gallery, and are of intense interest to me because they are part of the “unfinished” pieces in style. There is still significant debate as to whether the “unfinished” pieces are in fact unfinished or if their appearance is exactly what Michelangelo intended. They are called “unfinished” because they have coarse textures in parts and tool marks are prominent over significant portions of the pieces, to the point that some portions of the pieces are in fact only roughed-in forms without complete features.
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