Nantes 2: Photographing the Cathedral

Sometime near four o’clock in the evening I was returning from a walk and as I came to the top of my street, I looked off to the south-west, towards the cathedral and, inspired by my view, decided that I should photograph the cathedral from that spot on the corner of Rue Préfet Bonnefoy and Rue Henri IV, at that moment (or as soon as possible), that the view I was taking in at that moment, from that perspective would be the ideal view to turn into a photograph, a physical representation of what would otherwise be a memory or a daily but ephemeral daily habit. Having darted inside, up the three (or six half-) flights and down again, back up to the corner, I poised and posed, angled and focused and decided that a few paces forward, towards the cathedral, would offer a bolder shot and so took such paces and, immediately upon so doing, made the same decision again two or three times. From this perspective, the shot had indeed become quite a bit bolder, but I was now dealing with the monument in the center of Place de St. Pierre, which was relatively appearing to stand in the center of my shot, distracting, splitting and leveling that sense of boldness which had now become my undeclared objective, or rather, of course, was the capturing of such.

To circle right, to circle left in order to solve this problem were my options. The right circling demanded much more traveling, as to circle right would have been to step right out onto Rue Henri IV and so to have to step many more steps. This, it seemed, would change the shot irreparably and perhaps unnecessarily and so, naturally, I circled left, crossing the much smaller street that, together with Rue Henri IV created the intersection at which I was now standing. This perspective certainly offered a good, bold shot, but from that south-west corner, I had lost the glare created as the cathedral crossed just between the sun and myself, the glare of which I had just recently grown so fond. The only option then for recovering the glare but also keeping out the monument was to cross Rue Henri IV at this, the cathedral side of the Place de St. Pierre and swing back out right, which is precisely what I did, although, no sooner had I done so did I realize that I had now come so close to the structure itself that I could not fit it all at once in the frame. As I have grown quite fond of post-development-assembled panoramic photographs, my situation posed no serious issue, but it did then pose the questions of what I was to include in this panoramic, and how many shots it should comprise; and further, it occurred to me, I was now no more than a few paces from the front of the cathedral, which the sun was certainly illuminating most boldly by now.

Placing myself in front of the cathedral and craning my neck to view its façade, it soon became obvious that the complex of scaffolding constructed around one half of the front side, bearing men performing restorative work, was not, in fact, the subject that I was hoping for. Sidling right, it seemed that shooting a panoramic, moving vertically, of just the right half of the front side might provide a notably different but equally bold (series of) photograph(s) as had been my initial intention. In order to radicalize the angle a bit, I took one or two steps at a time, checking my shot as I did, until I was viewing the façade nearly straight up from immediately in front of the right cathedral door. This shot revealed a bit of the detailing above the door, but the angle communicated a vertiginous quality as the final photograph captured the topmost part of the cathedral cutting against the sky, so very high above the lens. From here I began to notice new things about the cathedral, namely pertaining to its interior. It occurred to me, as I lowered my camera, that the sun was likely passing through the stained glass work at the front of the church in a spectacular fashion and I decided to enter and see if that perhaps was not the best angle of the cathedral at that particular moment.

The cathedral, upon first impression, appeared to be quite empty except for the woman sitting behind the glass with the painted lettering that reads “Secours,” the man sitting at the auxiliary pipe organ, and the softly blazing sound that the latter two together made. What that player lacked in virtuosity, the cathedral itself made up for in grandeur, and the compositions themselves made up for with alternating majesty and austerity. The occasional stray note offered up to the acoustics of the cathedral was returned innumerable times to my ears, each just barely offset from the one before, creating a welcome dissonance that was something beyond charming. The prayerful tones swelled and ebbed and reached out to the utmost cornices of the space, caressing and dipping into each architectural detail, each corner, each space between, long untouched by human fingers, long left to steep in light and breathless air and to be grazed only by the fleeting electricity of sounds, waves impermanent but somehow cumulative, striking slightly, but giving and swimming gracefully to be struck, to have swam; each interaction of wave and stone itself producing another form of its original, just offset, sent out a bit behind its original, to swim and swarm and strike again, mimicking the first, if a little softer, slightly the more offset, all the while participating in and accommodating the process in constancy. A B-flat slid high above the pipes, already half the height of the arches along the knave, crested at the peak of an arch and turned some varying series of numbers of degrees and drifted, dropped, or raced backed downwards, some countless succession of itself and its selves just behind, to find the nose of Duke Francois II laying stoned, listening, and giving, giving, giving back some countless succession of offset B-flats to slide, crest, turn, drift, drop, race and find again to start again to sound again and, of course, again until then with warning unseen because no warning was being searched, the sound stopped – or rather, the source went silent and the infinite or seemingly infinite processes enacted therein dove into one final series of successions, ringing softly but quickly into silence, as though the moment itself had sucked hard and fast an enormous breath into itself, snapping shut its lips to seal out the moment to follow. In the rapidly waning light, I photographed the one chapel with no icon and walked back home.