No Hillside School students here, and not this summer. Persons with skills for timing French vehicles may date this and share their expertise with a comment. This, of course, is the Arc de Triomphe. (Click to Enlarge - all the pictures)The collected grime on this record of the Arc can be compared to that on the above postcard. It looks similar. This I photographed in the summer of 1955 with a borrowed Leica. I was visiting Paris for two weeks as an "Older Boy Delegate" to a centennial having something to do with the YMCA. I no longer remember the conference well at all but Paris quite well. Like may other of the 35 older boys and girls (yes girls too) from the U.S. Northwest, I skipped most of the conference meetings and toured Paris by foot. And I have the pictures. Last year Berangere Lomont (of this blog) returned to the corner of my above snap and recorded this repeat. She comments "As we can notice, the Arc de Triomphe is whiter and the flag bigger. The population has changed too!"Another look of mine from 1955. I do not know what patriotic event is being celebrated here. Apparently the Arc is used so often enough. Berangere's clean "repeat" last September, 2009 of my 1955 recording. The flag is still bigger.Another cleaned Arc, this one from the side, 2009. Here too the people are different.Valiantly Jean and at least some of this students climbed the spiral stairway to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.Jean's July 28, 2010 view from the top. He looks east-southeast down the Champs Elysees. By comparison we "step" back and up into an Allied military plane in 1944 as it flies low over Paris at or just after the time of its August liberation. Note that the "traffic" is pedestrian and a few military vehicles on the Avenue de la Grande Armee. This view also looks east-southeast, and in line with the view just above. Here the west face of the Arc shows, and a bit cleaner, it seems to me, than in the postcard at the top, which shows its opposite face.Returning to the summer of 1955 and an older boy's recording of the Champs Elysees with his back to the Arc de Triomphe, taken from the same corner as those views of the Arc, shown above near the top.Berangere's later repeat, Sept. 2009. . . and Berangere's repeat of Jean and I at the same corner in the summer of 2005. (Opening this coming April 2011 at King County's MOHAI, - Museum of History and Industry - will be an exhibit of REPEAT PHOTOGRAPHY produced by Berangere, Jean and I. It will include subjects from Paris, Washington State, and Seattle. Please come for the opening, although we don't have the hour as yet, but you may not have a 2011 calendar as yet as well.)Left to right, Jean, Berangere and Jean's brother Kael, the director of Hillside School. Kael and his wife Anne helped Jean with the trip. This is late on the evening of their first day in Paris. Anne may be making sure that the students are asleep in their hotel. Nearly their last event on their last day in Paris, typically another visit to a Cafe, itself a landmark, the Brasserie Gallopin. Kael is on the right. The Paris hosts, Berangere and her husband Denis, are at the center. Denis in the blue shirt with his back turned to Jean's camera, and Berangere is half hidden behind him. Denis! Denis! Almost certainly Jean asked everyone to look at the camera. Postscript: Before their week in Paris the Hillside Students had a week in London. Here they pose at Trafalgar Square. What fun for the brass lion too.
