Harp walker
- 📍 Location: Philharmonie de Paris, La Villette, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
Under the overhang of the Philharmonie, where a sheet of closely spaced aluminium fins catches the light and turns into something that looks exactly like a set of strings. A single walker is visible at the bottom of the frame, dark and very small, at the point where the strings meet the ground.
I framed it so the fins would run corner to corner and fill most of the picture, leaving the human presence as a full stop rather than as a subject. The building is the instrument; the walker is the scale.
Everything here is decided by the exposure. The underside of this structure is genuinely dark, and the lit edge of the fins is genuinely bright, and there is no middle. I metered for the highlight, which drops the rest into near-black and lets the light do the drawing.
Jean Nouvel clad this building in interlocking metal birds, and the parts of it nobody photographs are the undersides, where the cladding becomes structural and repetitive. Concert-goers walk through here without looking up.
I wanted a photograph in which a concert hall is described by a visual pun rather than by its architecture, and in which one person is enough to give a building its size.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
