Heaven’s door
- 📍 Location: Axe Majeur, Cergy-Pontoise, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
The twelve columns of the Axe Majeur seen head on, with a single figure climbing the steps between them and the sky graded from pale at the horizon to almost black at the top of the frame. The columns are white, the steps are white, the person is a small dark mark on the centre line.
I worked frontally and symmetrically, and I put the walker on the axis rather than off it, which is normally a mistake and here is the whole idea. The title is not decoration: the composition really does build a doorway out of two groups of columns, and someone is walking through it.
The gradient in the sky is not added. Photographed against the light with a polariser and rendered in black and white, a clear sky darkens quickly towards the zenith, and that darkening is what lifts the white concrete off the background.
These columns stand at the top of the axis, at the point where the ground falls away towards the Oise. From below they look like a ruin of something that was never built, which is more or less what Karavan intended.
I wanted a photograph that is almost abstract and still contains a person, because the person is what tells you the columns are twelve metres high.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
