Notre-Dame: La Renaissance d’une Icon
solo exhibition of Tomas van Houtryve

from spring 2023 to summer 2024

Parvis de Notre-Dame
Paris, 75004
France

Notre Dame: Rebuilding an Icon is a major exhibition produced by the public establishment responsible for the conservation and restoration of Notre Dame de Paris’s cathedral in partnership with National Geographic.

Tomas van Houtryve’s large scale photographs are displayed in two sections. The first, The Cathedral After the Fire, features color photographs of the aftermath of the April 2019 fire that struck the Notre Dame and the beginning of the massive restoration.

For the second section, Echoes of the Past, Tomas van Houtryve used a 19th-century wooden camera and the wet-plate collodion process to photograph the cathedral and make portraits of workers, scientists and artisans engaged in the rebuilding. The black-and-white photos seek parallels with Notre Dame’s previous restoration in the middle of the 19th-century, lead by the architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

The images are accompanied with graphics by Fernando Gomez Baptista. Located in the main square in front of the cathedral, the exhibition is free and open to the public.

The exhibition was announced on CNN. Many of the photos were first published in the Feb. 2022 cover story of National Geographic.

Coinciding with the exhibition, a collection of open edition prints is available for a limited time.