The Pont Neuf

Acknowledgments

There are several people I would like thank for making this website possible. First of all, there is Russell Maylone, Curator of Special Collections at the Northwestern University Library. During our “annual lunch” over the past many years, we always ended up talking about Paris, Russell recounting his most recent acquisitions of iconography about the Paris Commune, and I bringing him up to date on the progress of the restoration of the Pont Neuf. We discussed a possible website for my restoration photos; he agreed to host the project under the auspices of the McCormick Library of Special Collections, with technical assistance coming from the University Library’s Digital Media Services group (DMS)

Russell put me in touch with Claire Stewart, the head of DMS. Claire was able to fit my website project into her busy development schedule, assigning Dan Zellner and Tom O’Connell to work with me on the design. I thank them all. Tom took the lead in the final design and implementation of the website. I greatly appreciate his attention and his expertise in working out the details on layout, navigation, fonts, and images.

There are many people in Paris who were instrumental in providing unique access to the Pont Neuf restoration site over the past thirteen years. They include the on-site engineering representatives of the City of Paris, and the foremen of the worksites, as well as the stone masons and sculptors who worked on the site.

I would like to thank one person in particular, Mr. Pierre Bauda, the engineer-in-chief of all the bridges of Paris, who was gracious enough to say “Oui, pourquoi pas” in 1994, when an American photographer called him requesting permission to mount the newly installed scaffolding in order to begin documenting the restoration of the oldest bridge in Paris. Now retired, Mr. Bauda is still collaborating with me on an exhibition of my photos to be held in October and November of 2007 in the Mairie (Town Hall) at the 6th arrondissement of Paris.

In addition, I want to thank another group of people from a multi-media school in Paris, Gobelins, l’école de l’image, who participated in the selection and printing of restoration photos for my forthcoming exhibition. Mr. Ricardo Moreno, a professor of photography at Gobelins, and his class of second-year students digitized my negatives and produced large-scale prints of the images that appear in this website.

Finally, there is my wife, Barbara, without whom this project would not have been possible. A tireless editor, Barbara not only helped me clarify ideas, but converted my approximate French and occasionally loose English into presentable language. For that and for all her support, I say, merci!