Much Too Short a Ladder

Paris has a way of presenting juxtapositions that are almost too perfectly absurd to be staged. Here, in the grand setting of Place de la Concorde, fountains spray elegantly into the autumn air, the French flag waves over the distant dome of the Grand Palais—and in the foreground, an oddly truncated ladder leans against a massive plinth, clearly destined to reach nowhere.

When I framed the shot, I was immediately drawn to the humour of scale. The ornate column, richly decorated in green and gold, stands in confident verticality, while the ladder—plain, utilitarian, and utterly inadequate—sits at a hopeless angle. It’s a visual joke, but one the city offered up without fanfare.

Technically, this was a challenging scene to expose. The sky was overcast, leaning towards flat, and the stonework was pale enough to risk losing definition in highlights. I underexposed slightly to retain the texture in the clouds and granite, later pulling up the shadows in post to recover detail in the darker recesses of the column. Compositionally, I chose to let the column bisect the frame, anchoring the scene and contrasting the grandeur of the background with the comedy of the foreground.

The photograph works, I think, because it resists the temptation to explain itself. It simply captures the coexistence of Parisian majesty and human oversight—a city that, for all its grandeur, still leaves room for the occasional too-short ladder.