Bastille station
- 📍 Location: Place de la Bastille, Paris, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
The Bastille metro entrance after the rain, with its red sign burning against a grey square, the July Column rising behind it and the pavement still holding water. The sign sits high and slightly right of centre; the column answers it on the left; the wet ground carries both.
This is the one frame in the series where I kept the colour, and I kept it for a single element. Everything else in the picture is grey, black and glass, and against that the red of the word METRO is the only thing the eye can hold on to. Desaturating the rest was not a treatment applied afterwards so much as a description of what the square actually looked like that morning.
Rain is what makes the composition possible. It doubles the lamps, it darkens the asphalt so the pedestrians separate from it, and it empties the square of everyone who is not in a hurry.
The Bastille holds no fortress any more, only the outline of one drawn in the paving, a column commemorating a different revolution, an opera house and a great deal of traffic. The metro sign is the most recent of these and the one everybody actually uses.
I wanted a photograph about the ordinary furniture of a historic place, and one word in red doing all the work.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
