Fairy summer

The story behind the photo

Tucked into the Pyrenees and nicknamed the Little Amazon by those who know it, the Gourgue d’Asque barely feels French at all. Ferns crowd the water’s edge and moss covers everything: the riverbed, the fallen trunks, the rocks the water runs over. On the morning I visited, a low mist sat over the water and folded the whole valley into a single wash of green, thick and humid and completely still.

In summer the light that gets through the canopy is green before it lands on anything. I waited for it to slip through just enough to catch the mist without burning through it, so the scene would keep its half-glimpsed, half-imagined quality, somewhere between a real place and a memory of one.

I framed low and close to the water to keep that continuity from the near stones to the far trees. A slow shutter softens the river without erasing it, and the only thing I was careful to keep sharp is the moss itself. In a picture made almost entirely of one colour, texture is the only structure available.