Visit the galleries

The story behind the photo

The Passage Jouffroy seen down its whole length, with the glass roof above, the black and white tiled floor below, and the lit shopfronts closing in on both sides. The frame is vertical and rigorously centred, because the subject is a tunnel, and a tunnel has to be photographed straight or not at all.

Everything converges on a single point in the distance, and it is the floor that carries the eye there. I kept the camera low enough for the tiles to occupy a real part of the picture rather than a strip at the bottom: the checkerboard is the rhythm section of this composition, and the shopfronts are only the melody.

The light comes from two directions at once, daylight falling blue through the glass roof and tungsten pushing warm out of the shops, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the passage. I made no attempt to reconcile them. That double colour is exactly what these places look like, and it is why they feel like neither inside nor outside.

The covered passages of Paris are the ancestors of the shopping arcade, built in the first half of the nineteenth century so that people could walk, shop and be seen without the mud of the street. About twenty survive, and they remain the quietest commercial spaces in the city.

I wanted a photograph of a corridor designed to be strolled through, seen at the one moment when nobody is strolling through it.