The Long Way
to King's Day Paris · Côte d'Azur · Brussels · Amsterdam, one 50mm, April 2024
In April 2024 a LiDAR convention put me on a train through four countries in ten days: Paris, the Côte d'Azur, Brussels, Amsterdam. I brought one lens, a 50mm, and never took it off. Every frame here, and every frame in its sister project, was shot at that focal length. It is not a discipline I recommend. It is one I'd repeat.
This is not a travelogue about four cities. It is about the ten days it took to stop photographing surfaces and start photographing people. It opens inside a building that wears its plumbing on the outside and closes on a man DJing out of his own bedroom window while two million people in orange fill the street below. Somewhere between the tiled recess of the Pompidou and the tram tracks of the Damrak, the trip warms up by about forty degrees. You can measure it in the files.
Machine Room
The building turned itself inside out so you could see how it worked. Then it painted eyes on its lungs and set them on the piazza to watch you back.
The Parapet
They came a long way to look at this, and now they are all looking at it, and none of them are looking at each other. Only the girl on the scooter has turned around.
Ground Level
Down off the hill, the first person who looks back. A pink hat, a teal saxophone, and eighty steps of Montmartre going nowhere in particular.
Projected Cities
Seventeen metres of gasworks wall and a hundred projectors, and a city that spends its afternoons showing you photographs of somewhere else. Stand still long enough and New York lands on your shoulders.
Blue Hour
The projectors shut off and the real weather comes back. Rembrandt is out here too, shrink-wrapped to a utility box with a vent cut through his heart, and someone has stuck a pop lyric on his nose.
Orange
An entire country agrees, once a year, to be the same colour. The dogs have been dressed. The tram tracks are a runway. Somewhere above the crowd a man has pushed his window open and pointed a speaker at the street, and this is where the trip finally gets a face.
