Bridge sunlights

The story behind the photo

The Pont du Gard at the end of the day, seen from below and from the side, with the sun resting on the hill just beyond the end of the bridge and thrown across the frame as a star. The aqueduct runs on a strong diagonal from the upper left down towards the light, so the structure is not presented frontally as a monument but read as a slope, which is what it actually is.

The sunstar is not a filter. It is what a small aperture does to a point source, and the only difficulty is timing: the sun has to be half hidden by the hill, because a fully exposed sun burns the frame and a fully hidden one gives nothing. The window is perhaps forty seconds wide, and you get one attempt at it.

Exposing for that light means losing the shadow side of the arches, and I let it go. The masonry closest to the camera keeps only its outline, the autumn scrub in the foreground turns copper, and the three tiers of the bridge are legible purely as a rhythm of openings.

What strikes me here is the arithmetic. Fifty thousand tonnes of limestone, cut and fitted almost entirely without mortar, so precisely that the whole thing still stands and still carries a footpath, built by people who might never see the city it was watering.

I wanted a photograph about engineering as a kind of optimism, and a light that arrives through the structure rather than onto it.