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Soon after embarking upon this project I noticed that the places I was to photograph had often acquired a peculiar something about them, a crotchet, a strange condition, a twinkle. A house I wanted would turn up abristle to the roof with scaffolding and in no mood to pose; or it would be tucked in a space so tight that my wide-angle could not take it all in without a linear distortion (the common trick-of-the-trade is to exaggerate the loom greatly); or a file of hunchback automobiles would be immobilized permanently along the façade, forcing me sometimes literally to climb up the wall (or a lamp-post) across the street with all my medium-format gear, in order to get a more suitable angle; or else the house would simply prove not to have survived. I felt sometimes like that eligible fool of a fairy-tale Russian prince who nocked his arrow, shot at random, and found it landed not in a well-kept backyard of a neighboring grandée but rather "in a bog, on a log, in the mouth of a frog" (with a tiny coronet).
The Pictures 1. 8, rue de Saïgon (16ème) Zembla depends on frames for navigation. If you have been referred to this page without the surrounding frame, click here.
1: THE GRAVEYARDS | 2: PARIS | 3: CAMBRIDGE, MASS. |
The trickiest location, after the especially mind-boggling French Riviera, was London, but Paris was also pretty difficult. I encountered there almost every obstacle mentioned above, and learnt to regard them with the serious attention of a Nabokov student, a close re-reader of meaningful themes. The outcome of my trek, on a sunny April week, was less satisfactory photographically than it was thematically, as it were--somehow I got the right sense of VN's presence in Paris, on his several trips in the 1930s from Berlin and after the family briefly "settled" there as the 1930s wore on. I think I can recognize that peculiar feeling especially well in the beginning of the Aleppo story written from fresh memory; Boulevard Exelmans is a few steps from VN's last address in Europe.