Mad hatter
- 📍 Location: Pont du Japon, La Defense, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
A man in a hat walking through the glass tube of the Japan footbridge at La Defense, with the elliptical steel arches receding behind him and their shadows drawn across the floor in a long diagonal grid. He is centred, alone, and walking straight at the camera.
The shadows are the composition. The arches themselves are pale and slight, but at that hour the sun throws them onto the paving as a set of black bands that run at an angle to the direction of travel, so the eye reads two rhythms at once, one built and one cast.
I framed low and centred and waited for a single figure. The hat matters more than it should: in a picture made entirely of curves and repetitions, a silhouette with an unusual outline is what stops the image from being purely architectural.
This bridge crosses the ring road between La Defense and Puteaux, and it is one of the few places in the quarter where you are enclosed in glass with the traffic underneath. It hums.
I wanted a photograph of a man walking through a machine, and a title that admits the whole thing looks slightly like a dream.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
