On what would’ve been my father’s 68th birthday, I posted the following picture on Twitter, and asked my followers to give me the location:
The easiest element in the photo was the Marc Jacobs store with the number next to it:
The arches in the background, by contrast, were meant to throw people should they have gone the Google Lens route:
That’s because at the time of my posting of the challenge, Google Lens would’ve directed you to a completely different place in France.
We should recall, however, that Google Lens will update itself and just because you ran a photo through there once, doesn’t mean that you will get the same result later.
There were many great responses to my challenge (please note that I didn’t tell anyone that we were in Paris when the photo was taken), but by far my favorite one took note of the building material:
That’s right, sandstone! When stumped, it can sometimes help to just take a note of the kind of buildings you see in the photo. What are they made of? What is the style?
“Rock” made a valiant effort to use the building number, meanwhile (you will eventually get to it, but knowing the city will help):
Here it is being used with the process of elimination on hand:
This is a great method, because as I always like to point out, geolocation is never a guessing game. The most tried and true way of doing it is to come up with a list of possibilities and then narrow them down.
I usually do these challenges in order to highlight online privacy and personal security concerns, but there is also the fact that we re-discover a lot of our family history when we identify the places we have been.
Paris with my dad was always grand. He took me there for my 16th birthday, and then we all went back for my brother’s 18th. At the time, I was still trapped in a hellish marriage in Moscow, and flying into Paris for a few days brought me immense relief. I was having an affair with a colleague at the time (never a great coping mechanism, but my husband’s infidelities were so numerous and blatant that my guilt was almost nonexistent), and Putin & Co. were busy slowly destroying the newspaper that I was in charge of.
Paris was a balm. We listened to “Let Her Go” by Passenger on repeat and drank our weight in Calvados. I remember how the cold stung my cheeks on the day we took that walk, and how glad dad was to be back at Palais Royal. I think he was quoting something from Alexander Dumas when I took that picture.
Even in the darkest times, I felt loved by my family. That’s what I take away from the photo and the challenge.
Have an old family photo you’d like to geolocate? Send me a message at nvantonova@gmail.com, and let’s see what we can do. Remember, a paid subscription of just $5 a month keeps this project available to all! And thank you so much to everyone who recently upgraded to a paid subscription ❤️