Notre Dame comparisons

An 800-year-old icon goes up in smoke...

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Louise: Terrible.

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Pierre: Striking at a nation’s cultural core. Like 9/11.

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BBC: Photo: Brookes Windsor

Louise: A bit different...

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Pierre: True. Not a good comparison. In New York, the building was less than 50 years old and 3,000 people died.

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Louise: And Notre Dame was 700 years old but nobody died.

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Eisenstadt: VJ Day

Pierre: Something else though. This photo of a man swinging his daughter just before the fire started. It went viral in a search for who they were. Like the sailor kissing the nurse on VJ Day 1945.

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Louise: A reversal of sorts. The 1945 photo was an expression of jubilancy after 5 years of the darkness of war. The 2019 photo was expression of joy before the fire destroyed an 800-year-old icon of France.

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Voice-over

Both photos became memes of a search for who the characters were. In the Life photo Alfred Eisenstadt’s photo was a mainstream-media transmitted top-down process. In the amateur picture posted on social media, the process became bottom up. Then it became top down as the BBC picked up the story.

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Vivian Maier, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Street Photography

Vivian discute la photographie de rue avec Henri...

Vivian: You must lift the Leica to take a picture. It draws attention to you.

Henri: And you use a Rolleiflex. Pourquois?

Vivian: I can look down into the viewfinder, the subject is not threatened, sometimes they don’t even know I am taking their photo.

Henri: I see the picture forming through my eye. You see it through your lens.

Vivian: We both have to choose the moment.

Henri: Oui. The decisive moment.

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Voice-over

“She could go into a space with a total stranger, get them to accommodate her by being themselves and generate this moment where two presences were kind of vibrating together …  and then she’s gone.”

Finding Vivian Maier (2014)

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