Houston native Hallie Jordan ’12 had only visited Paris once before last summer. But her passion for photography led her there again — haunting the latenight streets, documenting the life of the historical metropolis and searching for a new view of an old city.
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spring 2011, Jordan won a Rice University School of Humanities Focus Europe grant to travel from mid-May to mid-June through the City of Light, photographing the same locations immortalized by French photographer Eugene Atget (1857–1927) 100 years ago. The resulting show, “Days and Nights in Paris: In the Footsteps of Atget,” was on view as part of Houston’s FotoFest 2012 Biennial. Jordan chose Atget as a subject on the suggestion of photographer Geoffrey Winningham ’65, Rice professor of visual and dramatic arts, whom she sites as a mentor throughout the duration of her project. Atget documented Paris extensively for more than 20 years and wrote down the addresses of almost all of his photographs. Jordan chose about 100 photos taken between 1895 and 1920 in the city. “I was curious if I’d be able to locate the same places or not,” said Jordan. By searching on Google maps, she was able to locate in some cases the exact spot where Atget photographed, but in all cases at least the street in the scene. “Paris has been around for many centuries. It’s all tiny narrow streets. So it hadn’t really changed in 100 years — that’s a short amount of time in Parisian history,” said Jordan. “The first place I went was the Pantheon. I could stand in the same street corner that was in the photograph. I was blown away by that — that I could stand in the same spot and it looked pretty much the same. The cars on the street were different, but the buildings around it, which were residential apartments, looked like pretty much the same buildings.” While the subjects are similar, photography as an art has made many advances since Atget first picked up a camera. He worked with a large, tripod-mounted view camera with glass photographic plates, all of which would have been very heavy. Jordan, on the
Hallie Jordan