Lisbon walk
- 📍 Location: Parque das Nacoes, Lisbon, Portugal
- 📅 Date: 2019
The boardwalk along the Tagus at the Parque das Nacoes, with the cable car running overhead, three people walking away from the camera and the Vasco da Gama bridge dissolving into the haze at the far end. The perspective is dead centre and runs the whole depth of the frame.
Everything here converges: the planks of the boardwalk, the white railing, the line of cable-car pylons, the far bank. I put the horizon high so the walkway would occupy most of the picture, because the subject is the distance rather than the view.
The light is strong and slightly hazy, which in monochrome separates the planes by tone alone: the rail is white, the walkers are dark, the bridge is barely a grey line. Haze is usually treated as a defect; on an estuary this wide it is the only thing that gives depth.
This quarter was built for the 1998 world exposition on what had been an industrial wasteland, and the bridge at the end of the frame is seventeen kilometres long. Both are the kind of gesture a small country makes when it decides to look outward.
I wanted a photograph about walking towards something too far away to reach, on a morning when the air made that literal.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
