Covid procession allegory

The story behind the photo

I made this photograph on the cobblestones of Place du Panthéon in Paris during the pandemic, when the city’s streets carried a different, heavier kind of silence than usual. A masked figure walks past in the background, bent slightly as if under some invisible weight, on a path running alongside a stone wall with barred windows, an echo of the confinement so many people were living through at the time.

In the foreground, a motorcycle’s rear-view mirror catches a small, curved, distorted reflection of the bell tower of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, the church beside the Panthéon, centuries old and unmoved. I wanted those two things side by side, one fragile and human, one monumental and indifferent, as a quiet allegory for a very strange stretch of time.

The picture is divided between two points. The mirror takes the left foreground, close and sharp; the walker is further back, just right of centre, small against the wall. The eye has to travel from one to the other.

The depth of field carries the idea: focus sits on the mirror, so the monument exists only as a reflection a few centimetres across, while the human figure stays legible but soft. With everything sharp, this would have been a plain street photograph; as it is, it speaks of what was close and what was out of reach in those months.