Cloudy lighthouse
- 📍 Location: Phare de Verzenay, Montagne de Reims, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
A lighthouse a hundred kilometres from any sea, standing on a green hill above the vines. The absurdity of it is the subject, and the frame is built to protect that absurdity: a low horizon, the tower small and alone on its crest, and an enormous sky given almost the whole picture.
The cloud that afternoon was doing the work for me — heavy grey-blue masses with breaks in them, moving fast enough that the light on the slope changed every minute. I waited for the moment when the vineyard was lit and the sky behind the tower was not, because that reversal is what lifts the white shape off its background.
I framed vertically to give the cloud room to stack above the tower. A wider format would have turned the scene into countryside; upright, it becomes a column of sky with a small human object holding the bottom of it.
It was built by a Champagne house as an advertisement, which I find perfect. A hundred and twenty years later the marketing is forgotten and the folly is the landmark. I photographed it for that — the way a place can quietly outlive the reason it was made.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
