Michael Kenna’s first visit to Paris, in 1972, included a walk into Notre-Dame. What he carried away was an interior mood: dim light, candles, the choir rehearsing for Vespers, and the chance, inside a monument that receives more than twelve million visitors a year, to find a quiet pew and sit undisturbed. That private attachment runs through this compact hardcover from Nazraeli Press, the seventeenth title in the One Picture Book Two series.

After the cathedral burned in April 2019, Kenna turned to his negatives for what he calls a personal homage. The book is not reportage. It records a long acquaintance, and its character lies in the distance between two scales: a worldwide event and the photographer’s own early, jet-lagged walks along the Seine to the Île de la Cité. He is not explaining the cathedral. He is returning to it.

The fourteen duotone plates, held in sixteen pages, are joined by a first-person introduction that supplies their context. Made over forty years, during Kenna’s various wanderings through Paris, the photographs accumulate as a sustained personal record rather than a documentary survey. Many are printed here for the first time.

The edition is precise in ways that matter to collectors who follow Kenna or the series. It is limited to five hundred numbered copies, and each copy includes an original 5×7 inch photograph signed by the artist, made during a trip to Paris in 1973. The previously unpublished plates, the forty-year span, and the signed photograph tied to the same city give the volume a coherence that is specific rather than generic.