A Photo of a Photo of Photographers

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that there were almost too many hearts in Paris – up and around the Eiffel was where I started to feel overwhelmed this year.

Apologies if I’m place-dropping, but it was last year on the Brooklyn Bridge that I first got the slightly dizzying feeling that I was trying to achieve something that I couldn’t possibly do – I realised that I will never be able to photograph every heart I saw. That revelation (bloody obvious in hindsight) gave me the same sensation I used to have in my regular childhood Christmas nightmare, the one in which it was Christmas eve and I had to get home but it was physically impossible because I was half a world away. I stood there on Brooklyn Bridge looking at a swarm of hearts scratched and drawn onto the steel girder before me and thought out loud: ‘oh, crap, there’s a thousand of them’…

I knew this would happen when I went up the Eiffel Tower, and it did. There’s some work going on up on the first and second stages with some great hoardings around it covered in life-size photographs of people looking out over the view from where you’re standing, taking photographs.

There’s something wonderful about standing with your back to the view photographing a photograph of somebody looking at the view and taking a photograph. I got some funny looks.

In case you’re uncertain, the Eiffel Tower is here. Have a look at the ‘street view’ there, and at the lovely shadow on the satellite image on the map.