Last of three, and the one that surprised me. I went to Utah expecting the American story and came away with a French one, and I didn’t work that out until I got the pictures on a screen and started reading the writing on things. Two armies, two months apart, same sand.
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Forty minutes up the road from Pointe du Hoc, and a completely different kind of remembering. At Pointe du Hoc it’s in the ground. Here it’s on the houses, on the church, in the street names — and on a black plaque outside somebody’s front door that took me a while to properly read.
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Back to Normandy after seven years, and this time west into the Manche. I got out of the car at Pointe du Hoc at twenty to four and back into it at Utah just after seven. This is the first of three posts from that one afternoon — craters, concrete, and about six hundred thousand other visitors a year.
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I went to the Merville Battery in August 2019, between Pegasus Bridge in the morning and the war cemetery at Ranville in the afternoon. I wrote about both of those and never wrote about this, and the photographs sat on a disk for seven years. This is the part of that day I had let go of.
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There’s a photography blog I keep coming back to, and I want to tell you about it. Monochromia is a collective — photographers from Chicago, Nuremberg, Rome, Washington D.C., and a village on the Nile, all posting one black and white image at a time with barely a word of explanation. I contribute the occasional shot from France, which makes me biased. It also makes me a better photographer.
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A day trip to Paris with my daughter Kate in July 2020 — the Louvre, the Pyramide Inversée, and more steps than anticipated. Shot on Fujifilm XT2. Republished six years on.
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I had been noticing these fields for weeks from the car window — flat wheat and telegraph poles in the north of the Vendée, golden in the evening. One night, on the way home from dropping my daughter off, I had the X-T2 on the passenger seat and finally pulled over. The Helios 44-2 was on the front of it. I was back in the car in under half an hour.
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I had no plan, no destination — just a car, a camera, and an afternoon to fill. I missed the bridge at Ancenis, ended up on the wrong road, and somehow landed at Montjean-sur-Loire with a river wider than I’d ever seen. The Canon 6D Mark II and I made the best of it.
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May 1st: the first day of the Month of Our Lady. I loaded the Canon AE1 Program with Fomapan 100 and drove to La Rabatelière to photograph the Sanctuaire de la Salette. What I found was a burned church, an axe-marked door, a miller’s millstone, and a hillside full of statues built in defiance of the Republic. The Vendée remembers.
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A roll of 100 ASA in the Pentax ME Super, finished in the Forêt de Grasla. Frogs, toads, a wolf spider, and a stopped-down lens. Film photography in the Vendée, April 2026.
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A warm Sunday in April, a Canon EOS 500, and a roll of AGFA APX 100 at Nantes’ Jardin Extraordinaire. Film photography, slow days, and why it’s nice to be out in it.
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