Tomas van Houtryve spent fourteen years photographing Notre-Dame de Paris, a span that turned a familiar monument into a subject of sustained scrutiny rather than a single news event. The fire of April 15, 2019, gives the project its gravity, but not its structure. Before and after the blaze, van Houtryve worked with rare access to the cathedral, documenting both the destruction and the slow, largely unseen labor of reconstruction. What emerges is a portrait of a building as a living argument about memory, faith, and power.

The book takes its title and organizing logic from Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a comparison that matters more than homage. Where Hokusai returned to one mountain across seasons and conditions, van Houtryve returns to one cathedral, varying vantage point, weather, and technique. He moves between nineteenth-century wet collodion and aerial drones, so the photographs register not only what Notre-Dame looks like but how it has been pictured. The choice of process is historical evidence, not decoration.

That dialogue between past and present is amplified by a multilayered archive assembled around the artist’s photographs, including historic photographs, vernacular images, and writing by Victor Hugo. Van Houtryve has spoken of how devotion, revolutionary zeal, imperialism, and mass consumerism are recorded in the ways Notre-Dame has been depicted and reproduced. The book’s bilingual English and French text, with an essay by curator Pauline Vermare, treats the cathedral as an image with a history, not merely a structure with a silhouette.

For collectors, the appeal lies in that double subject: an extraordinary body of access-driven documentary work, and a self-aware meditation on photographic technique and reproduction. The 164-page hardcover holds thirty-six images alongside forty-two illustrations, giving the archive real weight beside the new photographs. It is a considered object about how a monument becomes an image, and how images, in turn, shape what a monument means.