There are moments as a photographer when the boundaries between disciplines, architecture, art, landscape, and light, dissolve into a kind of lucid synthesis. Photographing Eric Parry Architects‘ refined and enigmatic extension to the Holburne Museum in Bath during Bruce Munro Studio’s Field of Light installation was one of those rare, revelatory encounters.
The project lives as an archive of multiple stories: of architectural renewal, civic memory, and artistic reverie. But more than that, it became an opportunity to explore how photography, an art so often associated with freezing time, can instead bend time, merge moments, and suggest continuities that otherwise can only be guessed at.
Munro’s illuminated garden installation, thousands of glowing fibre-optic stems humming gently in the dusk, was a transient artwork, poetic and immersive, explicitly designed to be felt rather than fixed.
Parry’s building, by contrast, is a composition of permanence and restraint, crafted with ceramic and glass, responding with careful precision to its Georgian context.
My task, as I saw it, was not just to document these elements in parallel, but to find a visual idiom that allowed them to speak to one another, across time, material, and sensibility. I photographed over several hours, from late afternoon to deep night, from a fixed camera position, capturing the movement of cloud, the changes of mood, the approach of dusk . The Field of Light glimmered into being gradually, gaining intensity as the natural light ebbed. Shadows lengthened, silhouettes sharpened, then melted. I layered these images in post-production, using Photoshop to blend exposures in a way that allowed for a Magrittean disjunction, the blue sky of late afternoon overhead, serene and painterly, while the ground below glowed with nocturnal warmth, lit by the field of illuminated stems and the ambient spill from the café’s interior.
This composite, my Empire of Light homage, is not a deception, nor even a manipulation. It was a truth assembled, a narrative image rather than a literal one. Just as Magritte’s painting juxtaposes a lucid sky with a shadowy landscape to challenge our sense of time and certainty, the photograph attempts to hold two temporal realities in tension: the contemplative clarity of day, and the emotional resonance of night. One image, two experiences. A reflection not of what the eye sees at any single instant, but what the mind feels over time.
Architecture, contains within it layers of intention and memory. It responds not just to the material present, but to what came before and what might follow. Likewise, Munro’s ephemeral lights were anchored in the landscape’s ancient stillness, yet glimmered with the promise of renewal. To photograph these together, in a mode that honoured both the factual and the fantastical, felt deeply appropriate.
