Golden flamingos
- 📍 Location: Étang de Vaccarès, Camargue, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
Three flamingos feeding at the Vaccares lagoon, in the Camargue, reduced to pure silhouette on water the colour of a furnace. Heads down, necks folded into that improbable hook they use to sweep the bottom, they have stopped being pink birds and become black signs on an orange page.
The frame is close to square and the horizon has been removed completely. There is no sky, no bank, no indication of scale: only water, three birds, their reflections and a few dark stakes standing in the shallows. When you take away the horizon you also take away the documentary, and what is left is a drawing.
The colour is not an effect. At the end of the day the lagoons of the Camargue return the entire sky, and for about twenty minutes the water is more intensely coloured than the sunset that made it. Exposing for that surface is what turns the flamingos into shadows, and I accepted the loss of every detail in the birds in exchange for the purity of the graphic shape.
I remember the silence more than the colour. The Camargue at dusk is an enormous flat place where sound carries for kilometres, and the only thing you hear is the water being filtered through three beaks.
My intention was to photograph the most ornamental bird in Europe stripped of its ornament, and to let the shape alone carry it.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
