Notre Dame de Paris has stood for over 850 years. I saw it for the one and only time just over twenty years ago in 1999, when MrsDarwin and I went there for Palm Sunday mass there during Spring Break of our European semester in college. I never would have thought that I would live to see it suffer a catastrophic fire.
One of the things that appeals to me about film photography is the way that it turns something as transient as an image into something which can remain for decades. My grandmother's box of photos included prints up to a hundred years old, most of them looking much as they had when first made. The four images above are ones that I took that spring day twenty years ago. After searching through a few boxes this evening, I found them as fresh as ever. It's hard to believe that cathedral roof and spire are now melted and caved in.
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I did the same thing . . . dug through a box of pictures and came up with a few, not good enough to be worth sharing with others, but so valuable to me for the freshness of feeling they bring. Mine are blurry and poorly-framed shots of the solemn procession on Christmas Eve, and I can feel the cold air as they opened the central doors, the newly-placed ring on my finger, and my fiance and my parents standing next to me in the crowd. I can't bring myself to believe it's burned.
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