When Tomas van Houtryve walked into Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral four years ago, he was wearing a hazmat suit and looking through a massive hole in its ceiling.
At first you notice “all its grandeur and beauty,” the photographer said. “But then when you look up, there’s this awful hole that’s been torn right through the very heart of the cathedral.”
The building is one of history’s great constants, ever since its 182-year-long construction was completed in 1345. In 1455, it hosted the posthumous retrial of Joan of Arc. In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor there. In 1944, its bells tolled the day Allied forces entered Nazi-occupied Paris.
And in 2019, a fire ravaged the cathedral, ending the illusion that it was somehow untouchable.
Van Houtryve began photographing Notre Dame in 2009. At first, he did so casually, building what he calls an “accidental archive” of pictures, mostly made from the apartment of a friend whose windows boasted a view of the cathedral. As one of the most-photographed places in the world, he says he spent much of his career actively avoiding Notre Dame.
“And then the fire hit, and, of course, I regretted that,” van Houtryve said. It was only then that he began to photograph it, and its reconstruction, with true intention. On assignment for CNN, he captured the mood of Paris in the fire’s immediate aftermath.
Five years after the fire, Notre Dame is reopening to the public and van Houtryve has assembled his “36 Views of Notre Dame,” a visual study of the cathedral spanning 14 years and explores his relationship to the Parisian icon.
Gaining access to the building required persistence. Initially doing so for an assignment with National Geographic, it took months before van Houtryve was able to access the worksite. He eventually did so in partnership with Rebâtir Notre-Dame de Paris, a government agency overseeing the construction. Once he began photographing, he initially had to do so wearing the aforementioned hazmat suit and a respirator mask — necessary due to the lead contamination caused by the fire.
Workers finish assembling the cathedral’s rebuilt spire in December 2023.
Statues look out from the cathedral’s south bell tower in 2021.
Van Houtryve’s background is in photojournalism, and when he first gained access to the site he felt he should document the “height of the drama” happening around him. But, living in Paris, he is also very in tune with the city’s long history of street photography, where for decades everyday life has been captured in the figurative shadow of Notre Dame. And in his career, van Houtryve has often utilized specific types of cameras and photographic techniques to amplify specific stories.
“36 Views of Notre Dame” pulls all these threads together, combining digital photography with drone work and historical techniques such as large-format film and wet-plate photography, to tell the story of one building.
“It’s such a rich subject that I felt like I just sort of had to throw everything that I’d ever learned as a photographer at it,” van Houtryve said. “I could see how each of these techniques would help with the sort of main project of the book, which is to see Notre Dame in a new light and in multiple lights.”
Van Houtryve doesn’t just see Notre Dame. He showcases it. His pictures explore the details of the cathedral’s architectural work, its place in the skyline of Paris and its presence from the streets below.
The eastern end of the cathedral is covered in scaffolding and its flying buttresses are reinforced with wooden braces during reconstruction in December 2022.
Roof trusses made from oak beams wait on a dock near the Seine in July 2023 before they would be transported to the cathedral for reconstruction.
To make one of the book’s most striking photographs, van Houtryve used a hydraulic crane to place himself in the exact spot where the spire had once been, showing the hole it left in its wake. Charred, broken remains of the cathedral ceiling give way to the columns and floor below, which are covered in safety nets and surrounded by scaffolding.
“It was looking into the eye of destruction, like you would imagine the eye of a hurricane,” van Houtryve said.
“You could see this glow coming up from the altar, through these safety nets and stuff, that was just kind of this heavenly glow on one side and this infernal landscape on the top,” he continued. “As a picture, it also seems charged with symbolism.”
Another series of images shows how van Houtryve’s relationship to Notre Dame has evolved.
The first is from before the fire. It’s a picture from van Houtryve’s “accidental archive” — a test of his wet-plate camera. The second is from that same spot, after the fire and when the cathedral was without a spire or roof. And the third is from the week that Notre Dame’s new spire, still covered in scaffolding, had finished reconstruction.
Tomas Van Houtryve captured this image of the Notre Dame Cathedral in 2017, two years before it caught fire.
The cathedral in January 2022, during its reconstruction. There’s no spire or roof yet.
The cathedral in December 2023, the week that assembly was finished for its rebuilt spire.
“The point of the book is actually this same process I went through,” van Houtryve said. “How do you kind of learn to observe something that you’ve ignored?”
As van Houtryve made his pictures, he began to see his documentation of Notre Dame in parallel to the generations of craftspeople who built and maintained it. When the construction of Notre Dame began, the people building it knew that it would not be completed in their lifetimes — or even their children and grandchildren’s lifetimes.
Now, using a mix of what van Houtryve called “medieval know-how” and modern technology, there is a new generation of workers who have restored the hallowed cathedral.
“I feel like I’m kind of in this intergenerational chain of people who have been representing Notre Dame over the years,” van Houtryve said.
Tomas van Houtryve’s book, “36 Views of Notre Dame,” published by Radius Books, is now available. The work is also on exhibit at the Galerie Miranda in Paris through December 23. The cathedral reopens to the public on December 8.