Some photographs are really about a person. Others are about a place. Beneath the Glass sits somewhere between the two. The architecture is immediately dominant: the enormous stained-glass ceiling, repeating arches, columns and decorative patterns all pull the eye upward. Then, almost in opposition to that grandeur, there is a single person descending the stairs.
She gives the photograph its scale.
Without her, this could almost become a study of architecture. With her, it becomes a moment.
What attracted me to the scene was the symmetry. The stair rails push towards the centre, the columns radiate outward above them and the figure sits almost perfectly on the central axis. There is a strong sense of order, but because she is moving through the frame it never feels completely static.
This is also where I enjoy the Leica M11.
Compared with the film photographs I shoot, the M11 gives me an extraordinary amount of information to work with. The intricate glasswork, patterns in the floor, reflections and highlights all remain beautifully defined. In black and white, that resolution becomes less about technical perfection and more about texture and structure.
The photograph is busy, yet the composition feels simple.
Your eye finds the woman first, follows her down the staircase and then starts wandering through all the extraordinary detail around her. There are photographs where simplifying means removing things from the frame. Here, the opposite works: the complexity of the building is the subject.
What interests me most, though, is the relationship between something permanent and something temporary.
The architecture may remain for generations.
The person was there for perhaps a second.
My job was simply to notice when the two came together.
