Egret in black

The story behind the photo

A little egret fishing at Pont de Gau, in the Camargue, photographed against a bank so deeply shadowed that the water behind her has gone entirely black. The bird is white, the background is night, and between the two there is nothing at all: no reeds, no horizon, no second subject. This is a picture made by subtraction, and what was subtracted was chosen at the moment of shooting rather than afterwards.

The exposure is set for the plumage and nothing else. Egrets are almost impossible to expose correctly because white feathers in sunlight burn out two stops before everything else does, and here the only way to keep the detail in the neck and the wing was to let the dark stay dark and fall to pure black. The reflection underneath is the sole indication that there is water at all.

The Camargue is usually photographed wide, in pink and pale blue, all salt and horizon. I wanted the opposite of that postcard: a single bird isolated in the dark, closer to a seventeenth-century still life than to a wetland.

Watching an egret hunt is watching restraint. Everything is slow until it is not, and the strike, when it comes, is over before the eye registers it. I wanted the print to hold the slow part, the long, held moment of concentration just before anything happens.