Monmartre Cemetery: Part 1 - The Devil is in the Details.

I photographed the cemetery at Monmartre in Paris in the final stages of a three-week trip for my fiftieth birthday.  At that point, I was a little burned out after three weeks on the road, and a little stressed by five days of struggling to survive on my high school French in Paris, and as such I don't really feel that I did justice to my subject.

Unlike some of the other cemeteries that I'd photographed, Montmartre lacked that sense of decrepitude and decay that tends to interest me photographically.  As a result, I felt more than a little lost as I wandered the laneways between tombs.  However, little things began to catch my eye, details and decorations that had lost their perfection over time, and that was when I started to find it interesting.

The figure of the crucified Christ whose head starts the gallery above was an astonishing image. It's difficult to imagine how this statue would have looked before decades of verdigris and dirt had marked it; I suspect it would lack the drama that Time had provided.

 

When working on the images for this gallery, I did something that I've never tried before, and desaturated the background. It really didn't make any difference, the strength of the central figure made the background irrelevant. Nonetheless, here's the alternate version for the purposes of comparison.

 

 - Sid