Julian bridge

The story behind the photo

The Pont Julien in the Luberon, photographed from the dry riverbed with the sun setting right on the edge of the deck. The bridge runs across the frame and the light comes from inside it, which is the only way to photograph a structure whose whole meaning is its openings.

I worked low and close, so that the near arch would rise above the horizon line and the burnt grass of the riverbed would fill the bottom of the picture. Standing on the road above gives you a bridge; standing where the water used to be gives you architecture, and reminds the viewer that the Calavon is a river that spends much of the year absent.

The light is late, low and directional. It sets fire to the dry grass, leaves the upstream face of the stone in shadow and turns the arch into a frame around a piece of sky. The contrast is extreme and I did not try to reduce it: the subject here is the difference between what is lit and what is not.

The bridge was built around 3 BC on the Via Domitia, and it carried ordinary road traffic, cars included, until 2005. Two thousand years of continuous service, and it was retired only to preserve it, once a new bridge had been built nearby. That fact changes how you stand in front of it.

I wanted an image about endurance without solemnity: warm stone, dead grass, and a low sun that treats a Roman bridge like any other object in a field.