Tour de France – Covid edition
- 📍 Location: Trocadero, Paris, France
- 📅 Date: 2021
A cyclist standing with his bike against a wall of vertical wooden boards, wearing a mask, looking up at a small framed image of the Eiffel Tower fixed to the panelling. The wall fills the frame, the man is centred, and the only thing to see in the entire picture is a photograph of the thing standing directly behind the camera.
That substitution is the whole joke and the whole point. The hoarding was put up around works at the Trocadero, hiding the view, and someone had mounted a little picture of the monument on it. A cyclist stopped in front of it exactly as one stops in front of a landmark.
I framed it flat and frontal, like a studio portrait, so the boards would read as a striped backdrop and nothing would suggest that there is anything behind them. The absence of any horizon is what makes the image work.
The title is the date. Masks, a city under restrictions, a monument you could not approach, and a man out on his bike because it was one of the few things still allowed.
I wanted a photograph that will be completely incomprehensible in thirty years and completely obvious to anyone who was there.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
