Crane shadows

The story behind the photo

Two common cranes crossing an orange sky near the Lac du Der, at the moment in the evening when the light no longer illuminates anything and only colours it. The birds are pure silhouette, wings held in that long, unhurried beat which distinguishes a crane from every other large bird in flight, and the frame contains nothing else: no ground, no water, no horizon.

I exposed for the sky and let the cranes go black without hesitation. There was no other honest option: in that light a bird is already a shadow to the naked eye, and trying to recover the plumage would have produced a picture that nobody standing beside me would have recognised.

The composition is built on emptiness and a diagonal. The two birds are small, placed off centre and moving out of the frame rather than into it, so the space they have already crossed is larger than the space that remains. It should feel like a departure.

Every autumn, tens of thousands of cranes stop at the Der on their way between the Baltic and Spain, and the sound arrives long before the birds do, a rolling metallic clamour that fills the whole valley. Standing under it is one of the few experiences that make you feel geographically small.

I wanted the print to hold the end of that day: two birds, one colour, and the noise you have to imagine.