Farm in sunflowers
- 📍 Location: Ardèche, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
A small stone farm building stands in the middle of a field that has completely surrounded it. The sunflowers come right up to the walls, and from where I stood the house appears to be floating on them rather than standing in soil.
I used a long lens from the edge of the field, which compresses the distance and stacks the flowers into a dense golden mass behind and in front of the building. A wide lens would have shown the field honestly, with gaps and rows and bare earth, and the house would have looked far away and unimportant.
The far hills are deliberately soft. Ardèche light in late summer carries a lot of haze, and rather than fight it I let the background go pale so the only crisp things in the picture are the roof line and the nearest heads of the flowers.
What holds me here is the ordinariness of it — a working building in a working field, photographed on an evening when both happened to be at their best. I would rather make an image of something that is simply doing its job than go looking for a spectacle.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
