Dress platform walk
- 📍 Location: Pont d’Iena, Paris, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
Under the Pont d’Iena, with the roadway of the quay running out towards the light and a woman’s silhouette walking across the bright opening. The whole upper half of the frame is the dark underside of the bridge; the lower half is a set of straight white lines painted on asphalt.
Those lines are the reason for the frame. Road markings under a bridge are pure geometry, and photographed from low down they converge towards the same point as the architecture, so the picture is built twice over on the same vanishing point. The figure is placed where the two systems meet.
The exposure protects the outside and abandons the inside, which is the only honest way to render standing in a shadow and looking towards the sun. What is lost is the detail of the vault. What is gained is a single silhouette that reads at a glance.
The Iena bridge carries the traffic between the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower and is crossed by an enormous number of people every day. Underneath it, nobody stops.
I wanted a photograph made in the space that everyone walks past and nobody photographs, with the ordinary paint of a roadway doing the work of a composition.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
