Umbrellas at Notre Dame

When it rains in Paris.

On a rainy Saturday last in November, I walked down around Paris's first arrondissement with my camera, and took photos of people under their umbrellas.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton has a theory about why wide-brimmed hats are popular on Instagram:

Wide-brimmed hats have become popular because influencers started using them to define their heads in photos, to enable them to look like be-haloed Madonnas rather than pin-headed little plebes.

I find that umbrellas have the same effect, creating a halo for their owner. Thanks also to the lovely diffuse light of drizzly days, I have collected a good number of photos featuring umbrellas.

I took these four photos as I circumambulated Notre Dame, following my old route from the Marais, across Île Saint-Louis to the left bank, stopping at Shakespeare and Co, then across Île de la Cité toward Hôtel de Ville — one of my favorite walks in the world.