Love temple
- 📍 Location: Etang de Bonnelles, Yvelines, France
- 📅 Date: 2023
The little temple bridge on the pond at Bonnelles, in late autumn, with the woods behind it in full copper and the whole scene repeated upside down in the water. The folly sits exactly in the middle of the frame, small, symmetrical and slightly absurd, and everything else in the picture is there to look at it.
I centred it on purpose. This is a built object designed to be admired from a distance, and refusing the symmetry would have been a photographer’s affectation. What breaks the mirror is the surface of the pond, which is not quite still: the reflection is softened and stretched, so the upper half of the picture is architecture and the lower half is painting.
The light is grey and low-contrast, and that is what allows the colour. Direct autumn sun would have blown the oranges into a single hot mass; under cloud, the wood separates into four or five distinct browns and reds, and the pale stone of the arch keeps its value against them.
These nineteenth-century estate follies were built for walks, conversations and a certain amount of showing off. They are now mostly empty, standing at the end of ponds in woods that the public walks through without knowing whose idea they were.
I wanted a photograph of a small ornamental gesture left to age in a real forest, and of the season that suits it best.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
