Golden columns
- 📍 Location: Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France
- 📅 Date: 2020
Under the Fondation Louis Vuitton at night, where the building rests on a shallow sheet of water and the lighting turns the structure into two colours and nothing else: a warm gold on the columns and beams, a hard electric blue in the gaps between them. The reflection doubles the whole thing, and the frame is built to be read either way up.
I placed the horizon of the water exactly across the middle, which is normally a mistake and is the entire point here. The subject is not the building, it is the symmetry, and a symmetry that is not centred simply looks like an error. Everything then depends on the line of columns receding to the right, which stops the picture from being a mirror and turns it into a corridor.
All the light is artificial, and that is a gift rather than a constraint: it does not move, it does not change colour, and it can be waited on. The only decision left is where to stand and how long to leave the shutter open so the water goes perfectly still.
Gehry designed the building as twelve glass sails over a block of white concrete, and most photographs look at the sails. The underside is where the engineering is honest, and where the light designers did their best work.
I wanted an image that reads first as abstraction and only afterwards as a place, and that gives a famous building back its geometry.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
