Inside The Palace of Power

I took this photograph inside a government building, in the afternoon, when the corridors echo in silence and the light is all reflected memory. The image focuses on a phone—old-style, maroon, hanging uselessly from its hook—framed by dark wood panels and infinite reflections. It’s a cliché of power, really: opulence, silence, and an obsolete instrument of control.

The technical conditions weren’t ideal. I had no tripod, the light was dim and uneven, and I was working with a handheld digital camera not built for low-light finesse. ISO had to go up, and with it came the noise. But I decided not to clean it. Grain, in this case, felt appropriate. Power doesn’t always need to be sharp. Sometimes it just needs to be looming.

The geometry of the image is what holds it together. Repetition through reflection. The mirrors stretch the space beyond logic, giving the phone—already outdated—a kind of bureaucratic infinity. Like decisions made and repeated in endless loops, always appearing but never quite reaching the public. The warm wood adds a false sense of comfort. It’s an aesthetic of control masked as tradition.

Framing was tricky. I had to avoid my own reflection while keeping the angle that would preserve the recursion. Slight distortion creeps in, but it adds a subtle dissonance to the symmetry. If I’d corrected it, I think the image would have lost its unease.

This isn’t documentary photography in the strictest sense. It’s observational. Not of an event, but of a tone. A texture. An atmosphere that says more about the theatre of governance than any press conference ever could.