#photo essay

In Paris, France, art culture is alive and well. Home to some of the most renowned museums in the world, such as the Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and Centre Pompidou, it seems as though the largest celebrities are the collections of art throughout the city. Visitors from all over the world flock each day to the Louvre to view classics like the Mona Lisa,Victory Angel, and Venus de Milo. In 2016 alone, the Musée du Louvre saw approximately 7.3 million people. (Source) Each person, upon entry, is immediately bombarded with reminders of the most popular works in the entire 38,000+ piece museum. Placards usher visitors through the corridors, promising to guide them to La Jaconde, and in turn leading them to the visitor dumping ground, piling them onto the sweaty heap of selfie-stick-wielding tourists, bloodthirsty for a peek at Mona Lisaherself.

Have you ever asked yourself why the Mona Lisa is so famous? It isn’t the epitome of fine art by a long shot. Like a Kardashian, La Jacondeis most likely famous because of scandal. In 1911, the painting was stolen from the museum after hours. The theft made international news as the entire world tuned in to find out what happened to the da Vinci original. After it was found, replaced, and vandalized a few times, it got new digs behind bulletproof glass and a partition, and thus the crowd formed. Suddenly, visitors were turning their backs on the other priceless works in the museum to make a bee-line for the swarm around the drama-magnet painting.

The public continues to drink in what the Louvre PR staff pumps out throughout the museum, collecting in pools around the Victory AngelandVenus de Milo. When they are finally through, they ring out their consumerist drool in the gift shop, emptying their wallets over anything and everything with the Mona Lisa on it. Shelves are coated in the iconic smile and captivating eyes adjacent to staggering Euro signs. Pop art models of Venus de Milo are arranged artfully at the entrance, hypnotizing passersby to drop their cash at the feet of the museum staff without even checking the price tag. Why? Because I’ve seen the real thing, and the countless pictures I took from every possible angle is not enough to commemorate that time I saw the most famous pieces of art ever.

The crowd around the Mona Lisa on a standard Monday afternoon. Note how few people are actually looking at the painting itself instead of through their camera.

Looking back at the sea of Mona Lisa visitors which nearly fills the small gallery room. The other works in the room are commonly neglected by the thousands of people who cycle through every day.

A smaller, but still congested crowd around Venus de Milo. This piece, like La Jaconde, is placed in the middle of the room, perhaps for ease of access.

With the Victory Angel at the top of the stairs, mobs pose a problem for the traffic flow of the museum. Some people will retreat to the balcony opposite the sculpture, creating their own sky box of viewers.

A new 21st century dimension to this phenomenon is the selfie culture. It is no longer enough to simply take a picture of the art. The amount of people with their backs to the piece in order to get in a picture withit seems counterproductive. Tweeting that you saw the Victory Angel is inaccurate, unless you have eyes in the back of your head.

Visitors commonly have to squeeze and elbow through the ravenous crowd outside the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. If you didn’t have claustrophobia before…

A fraction of the amount of visitors to the Louvre every day. Tour groups create waves in traffic throughout the museum, and have a tendency to linger at our favorite 3 pieces.

Gift shop display of Venus de Milo figurines in various colors. It’s almost refreshing to see something that isn’t the Mona Lisa, but these colorful little ladies are like chum for gift shop customers. At the end of the day, you’re going home with Lisa.

One of the many Mona Lisa displays in the Louvre gift shop. There’s a famous controversy about what her smile means. I cracked the code. It says, “BUY ME”.

The consumerism of the Mona Lisa extends outside the museum as a motif in advertisement. This ad is in a Paris metro station, but La Jaconde can even be found on billboards off I-84 in the United States.

Worldwide, in France, the US and beyond, the popularity of art is defined not by its quality, but rather by its value as a product to sell to an ususpecting, unquestioning, consumerist public.

The Coast to Coast, Glasgow and Isle of Skye

After a taste, probably best to follow through. 

I recently arrived back after almost three weeks in the UK. The first twelve days were spent with my mother on a trip we’ve wanted to do for a long time. On the road, in the mountains, on map, off map. What will be slow dripping over the next week or so are the photographs I just picked up from those fine boys at Sydney Super 8 (http://www.sydneysuper8.com.au) in Newy. Go there, develop there.

What Place: Three days of the Coast to Coast in the Lake District to the Yorkshire Dales- then Glasgow, then a sheep farm on Isle of Skye.

What Camera: I wanted to go holiday cameras- aka something faithful and something new. My two picks were a Nikon 35ti, and my new baby Canon Eos-3. As I’ll dig in more as we go, both turned out to be perfect and surprising- appropriate, inappropriate, challenging and a joy all at once. For two operationally easy cameras, it’s great to find challenges and unexpected twists in getting that sweet spot. 

What film is a little less wild and more basic. I picked up a bunch of film on the cheaper end- Kodak Gold, and Kodak Colorplus 200 in Glasgow when I was pinching pennies before London. For cheap film, I was surprised and tested by the quality of both. Wouldn’t be a holiday though if I didn’t introduce some form of barely-an obstruction for me to work with, now would it?

I’ll tag where each is from but we’ll move in and out of order. For now, let’s start on an afternoon walk around Rosthwaite.

, , , …⁣

⁣

Our boots crunched over loose, rocky scree and a vertical incline that threatened to topple us over at any minute. The track we were following was unlike anything we’d hiked before; less a path and more a trail carved out by the resilient villagers who lived at the top of this mountain.⁣

We had journeyed to the Northernmost corner of Albania until the road could take us no further; here we left the van and met our guide who would take us to meet the villagers living in some of Albania’s most remote regions, places only accessible on foot or by mule.⁣

At this altitude in the Albanian Alps there was no vegetation, nothing to suggest this area would support life; the closest thing to trees were the makeshift poles supporting a thin electricity wire than ran from the bottom of the valley to the peak above us. We followed the path arduously, gasping for breath and legs screaming in protest while our guide, who’d been traversing these mountains since he learned to walk, sailed ahead of us.⁣

Men twice our age passed us with ease, taking their mules to the top to fetch hay, and we doubted whether we’d ever make it to the end of this 2km near-vertical climb.⁣

But then, mercifully, the ground began to level out, and a luscious green pasture spread out before us, covering the plateau. This was the last place on earth we’d expected to see people living, yet unbelievably a dozen or so houses were spread out across the vast fields where horses and sheep grazed.⁣

It took another hour or so to reach a homestead which looked like it might be inhabited; many of the rest were crumbling ruins, long abandoned as their owners headed for the city. A middle-aged woman greeted us at the door, wearing a white head scarf and modest clothing; she was clearly surprised and excited to have visitors. She immediately invited us inside for coffee, and set about pouring glasses of rakia from a bottle shaped like a crucifix.

We were in awe of her home, which was furnished with beautiful polished wood items and an ornate wood burner in the center. We inquired how she had managed to get it up here, and she recalled hauling it up the same track we had taken, carrying it on sticks along with her husband on their shoulders. The same would’ve been true for every item of furniture in their house, making this otherwise ordinary house suddenly look quite impossible.⁣

After drinks, Age (Aga) happily showed us around her property; she had vegetables and dried mountain herbs in her larder, dried cuts of meat in her barn. She kept sheep for their milk, churned this by hand to make butter, and knitted clothes and rugs from their wool. Her water came from a spring and her income came from raising cattle. Every part of her life was fascinating to us; our minds boggled at the length and difficulty of the journey we had taken, hours from the nearest city with amenities, right up to this woman’s house that would be ordinary if not for its exceptional location atop a mountain.

It was still incomprehensible, even though we’d completed the journey ourselves, and we imagined her and her husband making their monthly trip to Shkodër then hiking back up the vertical path with their supplies; it was a world away from simply visiting the supermarket. From this vantage point we could see dozens more houses scattered across the mountains in even more unlikely places, and we were curious whether anyone still lived in them and what their stories were.⁣

We said goodbye to Age, who still had much work to do before the sunset, and began our painstaking journey down the other side of the mountain left in complete and total awe.⁣

This is an excerpt from an ongoing documentary project about the residents of the Albanian Alps, one of the most inaccessible regions of Europe. The video of this adventure will be out on YouTube on Sunday, and the full photo essay will be available to view on @lbjournalssoon.