Interview: National Geographic Photography Newsletter by Whitney Johnson

My work on the rebuilding of the Notre-Dame cathedral of Paris was featured in the January, 2022 National Geographic Photography newsletter, written by Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences at NatGeo. It went out to nearly five million readers.

The newsletter is copied below.

. . . . .

THE BIG TOPIC:

THE WORK BEFORE THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

Saturday, January 22, 2022

In today’s newsletter, the latest on documenting Notre Dame’s rise.

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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