Man and the pillar
- 📍 Location: Axe Majeur, Cergy-Pontoise, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
A dark concrete opening at the Axe Majeur, framing a tall thin tower in the distance, with a single figure walking on the axis between the two. The opening is almost black on three sides; the tower is pale and exactly centred; the walker is perhaps four millimetres tall in the frame.
The composition is a picture inside a picture. I used the concrete structure as a mask, standing far enough back that its edges would stay sharp and dark, and framed the tower in the bright rectangle beyond. The result is that the architecture does the cropping and the camera only has to be in the right place.
Exposure was set for the distant view, which is why the foreground has no detail at all. The steps at the bottom are the only thing that gives the black mass any legibility, and they lead the eye directly to the figure.
The tower is the Belvedere of the Axe Majeur, and the whole three-kilometre composition is aligned so that a walker moves from one framed view to the next. Photographing it this way is simply doing what the work asks you to do.
I wanted an image about scale: a very large piece of land art, a very small person, and a frame that makes the relation impossible to miss.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
