Trocadero, Paris

The Trocadéro esplanade offers the most formally composed view in all of Paris: the Eiffel Tower centered on the axis of the Palais de Chaillot, the gardens descending symmetrically toward the Seine, the whole arrangement designed so that one structure frames the other across the river. The Palais de Chaillot was built for the 1937 Exposition Internationale on the site of an 1878 predecessor, its curved wings extending to either side of the esplanade as if the building were opening its arms toward the tower it faces. The photographic problem this view presents is not technical but philosophical: the Eiffel Tower is the most photographed structure in the world, and the Trocadéro axis is its most canonical composition, so the question every photograph made from here must answer is what it has to add. The answer in this image is the light — the particular quality of a Paris sky above the formal geometry, the tower neither dominating the frame nor deferring to it, held in balance by a composition that Eiffel and the 1937 architects planned, whether or not they knew it, for exactly this.