River bed
- 📍 Location: Gorges de Daluis, Guillaumes, Alpes-Maritimes, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
Seen from the road cut into the side of the gorge, the Var has nothing left of a river’s shape. It has spread across the whole floor of the valley into a braid of pale channels between banks of stone, and from above it reads as a bright vein in very dark rock.
Black and white was the only honest choice. The rock here is famously red and in colour the picture becomes about geology; in monochrome it becomes about structure, and the white of the water against the near-black of the walls is a contrast no colour version could match.
I framed vertically to hold the drop from the ridge to the riverbed, with the misty ranks of mountains closing the top. The braid enters at the bottom and works its way up through the middle of the frame, which gives a static landscape a direction of travel.
Standing at the edge of a gorge and looking straight down at a river that is two hundred metres below and still audible is a particular kind of vertigo. I wanted an image with that in it — not the view from the gorge, but the feeling of being above it.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
