Description
On the Yonne, at Saint-Aubin-sur-Yonne, the lock gates are as old as the river navigation of former times: riveted girders, eaten away by rust and moss, assembled in crosses like an iron frame. The tight framing ignores the landscape to retain only this motionless confrontation — on one side the structure, its diagonals, its sharp shadows; on the other, the water that finds the flaw and springs out in bright arcs before falling back into the foam. The raking light picks out each thread of water against the dark, almost black background, and black and white heightens the contrast: the mineral matter of the metal against the living matter of the current. It is an image of architecture as much as of water, in which the human construction, weathered by decades, reveals its original purpose — to hold back, then to yield. There is something here of an old mechanism still breathing, a leak become ornament.
