Covid procession allegory
- 📍 Location: Place du Panthéon, Paris, France
- 📅 Date: February 2021
I made this photograph on the cobblestones of Place du Panthéon in Paris during the pandemic, when the city’s streets carried a different, heavier kind of silence than usual. A masked figure walks past in the background, bent slightly as if under some invisible weight, on a path running alongside a brick wall with barred windows, an echo of the confinement so many people were living through at the time.
In the foreground, a motorcycle’s rearview mirror catches a small, curved, distorted reflection of the Panthéon’s dome, ancient and unmoved behind him. I wanted those two things side by side, one fragile and human, one monumental and indifferent, as a quiet allegory for a very strange stretch of time.
The composition is a picture divided between two corners. The mirror takes the whole right foreground, close and sharp, holding the curved reflection of the dome; the walker is far away on the left, small, against a wall of bared windows. Nothing occupies the middle, and the eye is made to travel diagonally between two things that have nothing to do with each other.
The depth of field is what carries the idea. Focus sits on the mirror, so the monument exists only as a reflection and only at a few centimetres across, while the human figure stays legible but soft. A frame in which everything was sharp would have been a street photograph; this one is an argument about what was close and what was out of reach that spring.
Awards & Recognition
- Monochrome Awards, 2024: Honorable Mention, Street
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
