The Eiffel Tower in Monochrome, Paris
We were staying in a hotel in the shadow of the tower, its upper reaches visible from the balcony above our room. By that point in the trip the Eiffel Tower had become a kind of constant — present on the horizon in ways the city arranges almost without trying — and the familiarity made it easier to look at it as a structure rather than a symbol. This image was conceived in monochrome, the vintage treatment arrived at in post, because the tower in B&W is a different object than the tower in color.
Gustave Eiffel built it in 1889 as a temporary demonstration of wrought iron at height, intended for the Exposition Universelle and scheduled for demolition twenty years later. The antenna that saved it was later used to transmit the time signal that synchronized France; utility preserved what utility had built. The first photographs made of the tower — in 1889, by necessity in black and white — read it as pure graphic structure: diagonals and horizontals and verticals resolving into a form that looks less engineered than drawn. In those images the lattice has a clarity that a century of color postcards and souvenir photography has made difficult to see.
That is the reading this image is after. Strip the tower of its iron-brown paint and its green-lit evening spectacle and its associations with romance and tourism, and what remains is the structure itself: a problem in engineering that Eiffel's team solved with such precision that the solution became beautiful. The "vintage" in the title is not a filter or a style. It is an attempt to return the tower to the visual language in which it was first understood — and, in that language, the lattice could be 1889. It is an homage to the engineering and to one of the (also French) great photographic innovations of the earlier 19th century: heliography, a technique developed by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. In the mid-1820s, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. I'd like to think he would approve of the Tower, and perhaps appreciate his legacy.
