Anchor the mills

The story behind the photo

An old wooden anchor driven into the bank at Zaanse Schans, and three windmills lined up along the far side of the water. The anchor occupies the entire lower half of the frame, dark, close and completely out of scale; the mills are small, distant and still catching the light. The whole photograph is built on that disproportion, and on the fact that both objects belong to the same trade.

I chose a low position, almost at ground level, so that the anchor would rise into the picture rather than lie in it. From standing height it was a piece of wood on a lawn. From thirty centimetres it becomes a mast, a diagonal, a thing with weight, and the eye has to climb over it before it is allowed to reach the horizon.

The sun had already gone below the treeline and was lighting the cloud from underneath: the one moment when a flat country produces a sky that would look exaggerated anywhere else. The land keeps almost no light at all. The grass goes to a deep green-black, the water holds a thin copper line, and all the luminosity of the picture is in the upper third.

This is a place that exists because people refused to lose it. The mills of the Zaan were dismantled elsewhere and rebuilt here, one by one, to save an industry that once counted its mills in the hundreds. Knowing that changes how the row of silhouettes reads: it is not a landscape, it is a rescue.

I wanted a photograph about work rather than picturesqueness, in which a rotting anchor and a preserved windmill are given equal standing in the same frame.