Seiichi ENOMOTO

"Paris The Eiffel Tower"

Pages: 72 / photos: 65
Size: 207x233x13mm / hardcover
Price: 2,800JPY
Release Date: February 2014

Since my first visit to Paris about forty years ago, I stayed there many times. As I strolled about the town streets where people were coming and going, plazas and the riverside I often found various attractive scenes along the way. And what always gripped my attention was an iron tower three hundred meters high, the tower I saw beyond the trees and houses. That was the Eiffel Tower and it was beautiful. Especially when reflected in a store window, in a rain paddle on a street, or in the Seine, the tower looked so beautiful that I often lost count of time while gazing upon it. The Eiffel Tower was first opened to the public for the 1889 World’s Fair, which was held to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. A lot of visitors to the site in Champ de Mars ascended by elevator to the tower’s upper observation deck, and from there so high a place in a tower where no one had ever been they enjoyed the view in every direction, the view of a historically rich city, Paris. Though immensely popular among the general public, the Eiffel Tower was severely criticized by some artists and intellectuals. They called it a useless unsightly tower, a huge factory chimney sooted black, or an ugly skeleton, which aroused a heated controversy over the tower. But now the Eiffel Tower is indispensable to Paris’ landscape, counted as one of the symbolic monuments of Paris, of France even. When building the tower, the engineer Gustave Eiffel brought out the best from his long experience as a designer and constructor of iron bridges all over France and the world beyond. On the basis of rational and careful calculation, 18,036 steel frame pieces were joined by 2.5 million rivets to give the tower enough power to resist the wind pressure, which was the most important problem to solve. As a result, the tower gained its well-balanced stability and unique beauty created by its strength and elegance. I sincerely hope the photographs of the Eiffel Tower I took show my deep affection for the tower and that they crystallize the affective resonance the tower evoked in me.

Seiichi Enomoto