The Louvre via. tunnel

Yashica Mat TLR Camera and Fuji NEOPAN 100 ISO Black and White film.

I spent many hours over many different days – along this corridor that leads to the museum from outside the metro station Palais Royal Musée du Louvre – trying to make a photo like this one.

The long corridor is forever resonating with the voices of about one hundred odd people walking through it whilst the museum is open to the public. After all it’s the Louvre!

I’d already clicked about seventy odd frames fully aware of the fact that the integrated silhouettes of the people in front of me didn’t shape up to something that’d please me aesthetically.

And so one morning, I got there at about eight o’clock. Crowds had already begun queuing outside the primary entrance to the museum but bursts of people inside the long corridor were scattered. Nevertheless, the silhouettes didn’t shape up.

After about half an hour, a man rode past me on his bicycle; what were the odds of that? I had never seen anyone bicycle within the premises of the Louvre before. He could have been an employee, perhaps security. He had not anybody but these two women to ride past. This was the moment that I had been waiting for all along! My hands trembled as I took position to make the photo that would make all the troubles worthwhile. And as the man left the corridor, he turned to look back. And this is the result!

On a couple of occasions I found myself thinking that it’d be a better picture had the women been a little more to the left such that one’s head didn’t overlap the edge of the smaller pyramid. But that’s life! And that’s why I don’t photograph fiction.

FIN

I’ve also been writing about my impressions on some of the paintings that I’d come upon at the Louvre.