They Ran out of Room for the Dead

They ran out of room for the dead.

The cemeteries overflowed, corpses were left in open graves, Parisians in the Les Halles neighbourhood complained about the smell of rotting flesh. And, when the rains came, the walls of Les Innocents cemetery collapsed, spilling human remains out into the neighbouring properties.

It took years for officials to move the bones of the dead from Les Innocents and other Parisian cemeteries to the network of underground tunnels that had once been a mine but now are better known as the catacombs of Paris.

These shots were all taken in the catacombs of Paris. It's a place that's been extensively photographed already, of course, and looking at others photographers’ images online I find myself even recognizing some of the skulls – this is how familiar I've become with the faces of these dead people.

Although the bones of the catacombs were already very well documented when I captured these images, I have noticed that most photographers prefer to shoot them in black and white. I understand why. First off, B&W is more forgiving of bad lighting and the light in the catacombs is very harsh and very dim. Also, the lights are this weird orange hue–perhaps sodium vapour lamps?–that makes the scene very difficult to white balance properly. So B&W is a very natural choice.

But you miss something in B&W that I think is important: the green.

The moss.

The mold.

The weeds growing next to the lanterns.

It's only in full colour that you can see that the catacombs isn't just a place of bones and death. There's something growing down there, clinging to life, miles below the earth, in almost total darkness, amongst the bones of the dead.