Description
Before the bridge, the Yonne was crossed by ferry between Cézy and Saint-Aubin-sur-Yonne. The bridge was built in 1845 and opened the following year, at the height of the wave of cable bridges: since the one Marc Seguin and his brothers had thrown across the Rhône at Tournon in 1825, hundreds of suspension bridges had gone up in France. In 1850 the collapse of the Basse-Chaîne bridge in Angers, as a battalion marched across it, killed more than two hundred people and cast lasting distrust on these wire bridges. The Cézy bridge came through that discredit: a single 90-metre span, a single lane, long closed to vehicles over 3.5 tonnes. It is today the last suspension bridge still in service in the département. From 2023 to 2025 the Département restored it completely — the suspension replaced, cables, hangers and anchorages included, the deck treated against corrosion and repainted, the pylons and abutments strengthened, nest boxes fitted for swallows and dippers — before inaugurating it anew on 5 June 2025, for another century.
The photograph looks at it from directly above. The bridge is no longer a structure one crosses but a line: a red ribbon stretched on the diagonal, edged with its cables and hangers, its shadow running over the water. All around, the river acts as a mirror; clouds slide across it in pale masses on a dark green ground, so that the bridge seems to span the sky itself. On the left bank the vegetation spills over in vivid masses, hemmed with water lilies; in the opposite corner, a treetop answers it. The frank red against the muted greens of the water organises the whole composition.
To nineteenth-century engineers, a suspension bridge was a calculation of tensions; seen from the sky, it becomes what it is again, a wire stretched between two banks. The Water series follows water and what people have built to cross it.
