Into darkness
- 📍 Location: Philharmonie de Paris, La Villette, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
The underside of the Philharmonie again, and this time almost nothing is lit. A single wedge of sunlight cuts across the fins from the upper left, the rest of the frame is black, and a walker moves along the bottom edge on the boundary between the two.
This is the companion of the harp frame and its opposite. There, the light took most of the picture; here, it is reduced to a blade, and the composition is mostly empty. I kept the figure at the extreme right, close to leaving, because a subject about to exit a frame carries more tension than one in the middle of it.
The exposure is brutal and deliberate: everything below the lit wedge is allowed to go to pure black, with no detail recovered. On a screen this looks like underexposure; on a print, on cotton paper, those blacks hold the eye and the small figure appears slowly.
Buildings of this kind are photographed for their silhouettes and their cladding. What interests me is what happens underneath them, where the architecture stops performing and simply casts a shadow.
I wanted an image with almost no information in it, and a person walking out of the only light there is.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
