During my recent, unforgettably cool visit to Paris I did the touristy thing and went for a leisurely walk through the Catacombs of Paris, a 2km walk mind you, past hundreds of thousands of dead people stacked into neat piles – one of the first piles even had skulls arranged in a heart-shape, very romantic, I’ll remember to take a future date there.

The experience was incredibly cool, and not nearly as creepy as I thought it could be. Some of my fellow visitors touched some of the bones and reported a slimy, slightly sticky feeling on their hands, but I just did as my mother had taught me as a young lad and kept my hands behind my back, except of course when I was taking photographs.

I had a difficult time photographing anything decent as I had accidentally packed only 100 ASA film for the previous day’s daylight shooting and never swapped the film in my bag for some 400 ASA film before leaving for the catacombs. So I had to coax the Yashica to do long exposures, something the 50 year old shutter mechanism isn’t very fond of doing.

To compound my problems, I had left the tripod attachment on Retha’s digital camera (Nooooooo!) so the heavy tripod I was lugging though the tunnels was less than useless. Luckily there were lots of ledges to put the camera on, but I still only got 2 usable shots. The first (which you can see above) is of graffiti scratched into a slime and moss covered wall just as one nears the exit of the catacombs. The second, below, nicely shows how the bones are arranged, with each section’s originating cemetery carved into a stone block.

Below is one other semi-cool photo from the catacombs. You can see I wasn’t very successful at keeping the camera steady this time. For me the interesting thing is the bright marks towards the bottom of the image. They are where the 120 film is attached to it’s paper backing, and means that I must not have advanced my film far enough when loading. Bummer.

Date: May 13, 2009
Author: Diaan Mynhardt
Tags: bones, catacombs, paris, yashica