One Evening Through a Fence

I am not a city photographer. Big cities move too fast for the way I like to work, and every corner has already been photographed a thousand times by people with better timing than me.

But I had one free evening, a walking route that ended on a footbridge, and the sky was doing something unusual. The only clear view of the river and the traffic was through a chain-link fence. My first instinct was to look for a gap. There wasn't one.

So I stopped fighting it. I focused on the skyline and let the fence become a soft frame in the foreground. It turned the picture into something more honest: this is how you actually see a city as a visitor — from the outside, slightly fenced off, never quite inside it.

Sometimes the obstacle is the most truthful part of the picture.

I stayed until the light was gone and the cars had switched their headlights on. Then I walked back to the station, which took longer than the photograph.