This powerful monster racing across the railway bridge on the Pont de Bercy bridge, at the Quai de la Gare (Railway Quay) in Paris, is my imaginary idea of converting the Ministry of Finance into a futuristic express train.

The A TrainCopyrighted Digital Photograph

Initial interpretation of the scene

At the scene, my visual response was driven by the strong lines of perspective created by the road, the bridge and the powerfully brutal, modernistic lines of the architecture of the Ministry. This was a work of patience on a busy working day in the city, waiting for passing pedestrians and road traffic to disappear from view and for Metro trains to pass by. My vision at the scene was of the bridge performing its normal function of transporting the Paris Metro.

Something subconscious drove me to take a parallel set of images, without showing the Metro trains crossing the raised section of the bridge.

Interpreting later, with my mind’s eye

Viewing the image on screen, in my mind’s eye it coalesced into a dynamic, almost bestial, object travelling across the bridge. Two elements dominated my mind: the powerful perspective which created an illusion of movement towards the top left of the image and the subconscious memory of the Metro trains crossing in exactly the same direction, moments before this photograph was taken. On a minor, subliminal level, the fact that the windsock to the right of the building's helipad is blowing to the back of the "train" just adds to the illusion.

The facts that we are in an economic crisis and the Ministry is daily battling the doom-laden news from the markets,  added to the sombre quality of the light and sky, in my mind infused the subject with menace and power, adding to the instrinsic visual power of the architecture.

All of this worked to twist what my brain knew of the real juxtaposition of the structures I was seeing into a fanciful fiction and to allow an asterism to form…  

Asterisms

“An asterism is a pattern of star recognized on Earth's night sky.. Like constellations, asterisms are in most cases composed of stars which, while they are visible in the same general direction, are not physically related, often being at significantly different distances from Earth”. Examples of these are imaginary forms in the night sky, such as the Plough, or Orion’s Belt.

This image is such a sight, arising solely from an accidental angle of view which serendipitously combines two structures  normally seen from a facing angle – Here they are, seen normally, from the other side of the bridge from where I took the first image:

The real thing...Copyrighted Digital Photograph

The Editing Process

Having envisioned the scene as a train, I tried to enhance the effect of movement and the illusion of “trainness” by cropping tighter on the building and the bridge and narrowing the shape of the final image into a more elongated rectangle, so as to enhance the thrust of lines coming towards the viewer. Here is the original photograph, showing the wider initial framing:

Original imageCopyrighted Digital Photograph

The “livingness” of buildings

Do you get the same sense of power and movement as I tried to show here? I regularly respond to beautiful architecture with a strong sense of them being in movement. I once spent half-an-hour rooted to the spot in Ludgate Hill, London watching St. Paul’s Cathedral “dance” before my eyes. Other buildings, such as the Pyramide du Louvre squat firmly in place, but nevertheless shimmer in the night, also moving, but in a much more subtle way.

Architecture is art and is legally recognised as such by French law, which protects the copyright of the image of his or her buildings in favour of the architect and his or her estate for decades after their death. As my love of art developed during my adolescence, it gravitated naturally from the 2-dimensional works on museum walls to the beautiful architecture that surrounded me in the “Athens of the North where I grew up – Edinburgh. What is your response to the built environment?

Copyright Paul Grayson 2014