Blue night bridge

The story behind the photo

The Pont des Arts at night, seen along the Seine, with the dome of the Institut de France burning gold at the end of the perspective and the moored barges drawing a second line of lights on the water. The frame is horizontal and low, and the river takes up almost half of it, because the reflection here is not decoration: it is the other half of the subject.

Everything converges. The quay, the line of barges, the deck of the bridge and its reflection all point to the same place, and the dome sits exactly where they meet. I framed it so that the vanishing point falls slightly off centre, which keeps the composition from becoming a corridor.

The light is entirely artificial and entirely warm, set against a sky that has kept just enough blue to stop the picture from turning into a black field with lamps in it. A long exposure smoothed the Seine, drew each reflected light out into a vertical streak, and erased the passers-by from a bridge that is never empty.

This is the bridge of the padlocks, whose railings once carried so much steel that a section of parapet collapsed under the weight of other people’s promises. At night, from a distance, none of that shows: it is simply a footbridge between a museum and an academy.

I wanted a Paris that is recognisable without being illustrated, and a photograph in which the whole city is reduced to a handful of warm lines on a cold ground.