Opera bicycle

The story behind the photo

The Palais Garnier at the end of the day, with a cyclist crossing the empty avenue in front of it and a sky full of moving cloud above the green dome. The building takes the centre of the frame and the entire right half; the cyclist is a single small silhouette on the left, and he is what makes the picture a photograph rather than an elevation drawing.

I waited for him. The composition was decided long before he arrived: low viewpoint, the roadway occupying the foreground, the facade set back so that the gilded figures on the roofline sit against sky and not against building. What was missing was a human being of the right size, moving in the right direction, at a moment when nothing else was in the frame.

The light is post-sunset and mostly reflected, which flattens the stone and lets the artificial lighting of the facade begin to show. It also keeps the wet asphalt readable: the street returns just enough of the sky to stop the bottom third going dead.

Garnier built this as a machine for being seen in, all staircase and foyer and very little theatre. Photographed empty, at the hour when the audience has not yet arrived, it becomes something else entirely: a very large and very ornate object with a man on a bicycle going past.

I wanted the disproportion between a monument and a commuter, held in one frame without commentary.