I was walking on a rainy day in Shangai, surrounded by the Pudong Towers. In the past, Shanghai was the city that lived for four years. I was back since many years, my soul was making the experience of past memories. Pudong Towers were there, but I was not there anymore. I wanted to capture how the past could be a dark but shining image.
Everything is about the duality of the past. A duality that brings an image of unreality, like a city that is obscure and doesn’t exist. The past is tricky because it is made of the future. The creation of silver blades in a black sky is the symbolic eye of the absence. We are made of the past, but we are not the past. We are unreal as a city that has no time, where the only time is the future that doesn’t exist.
Showing that we should live in the present but that our present is only the past and future. So the present is the reality of the unreal, like a city of comic books. Gotham City is a place of a hero I don’t want to be. My present was the tentative of a lost past in a future of obscurity. The silver creations of the futuristic man may give us the hope that our past is a future totally different, even not on this planet.
Nevertheless this futurist vision is it hope? Is it what we really would like to live? Is it the planet we are going to build or the world we would like to build on other planets far from the Earth? The Mother Planet Gaia, our colored Planet Earth with blue, green, and red, is definitely turned into silver and black.
Walking in the rain in Shanghai on a normal October afternoon, where the grey was uniform, and people were grey also, my mind turned to the camera, looking for different city lights, looking for a different light able to break the dull grey of the sky and the people, even if the perspective could dramatically different. Escaping from the grey, connecting the world that should be colored but so often is no more.
An inspiration source was also from the Three Body Problem novel by Liu Cixin. People horrified by the presence of the Earth look for hope in space, calling here alien worlds just to discover that the space out there is even more terrible than our planet. The strategy is to hide their own presence in the Universe. To be part of the Dark Forest, hide ourselves in the Dark Forest. The Pudong Towers, made of silver lights, are moving out of the Dark Forest. They are launched towards the sky, but it is a darker sky.
What are the TWO most impactful features that make your image a good photograph? Don’t be shy!
The silver silhouette of the towers facing the dark sky and the transversal form make it an escape line.
If you could make this photo again, what would be the ONE thing you would like to do better or different?
Maybe taking an even larger panoramic view.
Claudio Pari shared this photograph with the FRAMES Facebook Group.
Photographer
Claudio Pari, Paris, France
Equipment and settings
Leica SL2 + Super Elmar M 1:3.4 21 ASPH
ISO100, f/9.5, 1/125 s.
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