Colored wind

The story behind the photo

A windmill at Kinderdijk with a rainbow standing behind it, a canal in the middle distance and a bank of tall grass and yellow flowers filling the foreground. The mill sits just left of centre, the rainbow enters from the right, and the flowers are deliberately close and slightly soft, so the picture is read through the vegetation rather than across an empty field.

That foreground is the difference between a document and a photograph. Standing back would have given a clean view of a famous mill; kneeling in the grass gives depth, a diagonal of yellow and a reason for the eye to travel. It also puts the viewer in the polder instead of on the path.

The light is that of a squall moving away: the sky is still bruised purple and grey on one side, the sun has broken through on the other, and a rainbow exists only in that exact geometry. I exposed for the sky so the band of colour would survive, which leaves the mill a shade darker than the eye saw it, and I think it is better that way.

Nineteen mills were built here in the eighteenth century to lift water out of land that lies below sea level, and they still stand in working order. This is a landscape that is entirely artificial and completely beautiful, a combination I never tire of.

I wanted a photograph where the weather is the event, and the architecture is simply what happened to be standing in it.