Pond serenity

The story behind the photo

The same small temple at Bonnelles, in the other half of the year. The woods have closed in, the pond has turned dark green, and the folly is now barely wider than the gap the trees have left it. Almost the whole frame is foliage; the architecture survives as a pale vertical in the middle of it.

I framed it tighter than in autumn, on purpose. Summer here is not about colour but about enclosure: the vegetation grows over the banks, the light drops, and the pond becomes a room. Leaving a wide margin of green on both sides makes that enclosure the subject, and turns the temple into something half found rather than presented.

The light is entirely filtered through leaves, so it arrives green and without direction, and the water returns it darker still. There is no sky in the picture and no highlight anywhere except on the stone, so the eye has exactly one place to rest.

A place photographed once is a picture; a place photographed in two seasons becomes a habit, and habits are how you actually learn a landscape. I came back because I wanted to know what the same object looked like when everything around it had changed.

I wanted an image of stillness that is not empty: a dense, closed, breathing green with one small built thing holding its centre.