Playground
- 📍 Location: Parc de la Villette, Paris, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
Two tall white arcs of a playground structure rising out of the ground at La Villette, with a climbing frame between them, bare trees behind, and children moving at the base. The arcs are the subject and they are photographed as sculpture rather than as equipment.
I framed them symmetrically and left space above, so the two curves would read as a single interrupted shape. From this distance the scale is deliberately ambiguous: they could be five metres high or twenty, and the children at the bottom are the only correction.
Flat winter light suits this. Hard sun would have thrown the arcs onto the ground and complicated a composition whose strength is that it contains almost nothing. In black and white the white concrete separates cleanly from a grey sky and from the tangle of branches.
La Villette is full of objects like this, built in the 1980s in a park designed as a grid of red follies, and half of them look like abstract sculpture and function as slides.
I wanted a photograph that treats a playground with the seriousness of architecture, and lets the children stay very small.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
