The Last Photograph

Over there, it is over there



Pont Neuf, looking somewhere



Seeing Notre Dame


To Père Lachaise Cemetery, because I thought Susan Sontag was buried there; actually she’s in Montparnasse.

Like Notre Dame this is as multi-national and camera heavy as a Premier League football match, a good exercise in the post-Coryat world of travel. This is a collectable, the list of those buried here is well known

And to wander without a map throws up a Delacroix here and a Bastard there. But it is depressing. Tommy liked his inscriptions, but I think it is better to return to the reasons for a man or a woman’s burial here: read the books, see the plays, enjoy the art. Jim Morrison’s down there somewhere; a Yorkshireman is searching out Piaf, he adores her music.



I’m taking photographs, like everyone else, and I’m trying to get an interview with the Magnum collective, which is 60 years old this May. I’ll write in much more length about Sontag, Photography, Robert Capa and the Ritz as time allows. For now I’m interested in the Last Photograph.



I take mine on “vivid” with digital zoom extended. Into the sun, and on the move. I think of my photographs as the “last” ones, they are always entitled, “Why does the story keep falling off the page?” Everyone is a photographer now, and I wonder how photographic meaning remains as it replaces some other kind of connection to a place, to people, and to experience.





To be continued…