


Meanwhile, he himself is overseeing the restoration of the cathedral at Nantes, which suffered a less-publicized but disastrous fire in 2020-and which his own father had restored after an earlier fire in 1972. Right: Pascal Prunet, a chief architect of historic monuments, is assisting his colleague Villeneuve at Notre Dame. The handle on top is clearly from a drawer.” The camera seems to have been assembled with a lot of pieces that one might find lying around a cabinetmaker's shop during the 19th century. “When I came back, they had unearthed a small, slightly beat-up, but perfectly working camera with a lens and three wooden plate holders. They said they would dig around in the back storage area and told me to return in a few hours.
OLD PORTRAITS PORTABLE
I told them I was looking for something portable and functional for collodion work. “The displayed cameras were all too large or too collectable to drag out into the field.

“Much of what they had on the shelves was for collectors or for use as props in period films and TV shows,” van Houtryve recalls.
OLD PORTRAITS PROFESSIONAL
Unauthorized use is prohibited.īut when he first stepped into Antiq-Photo in February 2017, it didn’t look promising: He couldn’t see anything that a professional photographer, even one with retro sensibilities, might actually use. Photography had advanced beyond daguerrotypes by then Nadar used the wet collodion technique, a process that captures images on glass plates. In documenting that effort for the February cover story, Paris photographer Tomas van Houtryve was inspired by a portrait made of Viollet-le-Duc, late in his life, by the famous photographer Nadar. Today the cathedral, including the spire, is being rebuilt again. Notre Dame, a masterpiece of medieval Gothic architecture, became Viollet-le-Duc’s masterpiece too. Led by the great architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, that first restoration became a pioneering embodiment of historic preservation-a discipline that was as new then as photography. It was built during a two-decade long restoration of the cathedral that began in 1844. The spire that burned in 2019, along with Notre Dame’s entire roof and its oak-timber attic, did not yet exist in 1839. Right: The spire that Viollet-le-Duc added to Notre Dame, replacing a medieval one that had been dismantled in the 1790s, is seen in a photograph made in the 1860s, not long after the spire was completed.
