France: lakes, granite and one blue car

The French prints here fall into three places that have almost nothing in common: a hilltop village in the Vaucluse, the granite coast of Brittany, and the lakes. Eleven photographs. They sit together because of how they were shot, not where.

Gordes, which is a problem to photograph

Gordes is on every list of the most beautiful villages in France, which means it is photographed constantly, almost always from the same lay-by on the D15. That viewpoint gives you the postcard: the village stacked up the hillside in golden stone, framed by scrub.

It is a good photograph and it has been taken ten thousand times.

Le Village Perché is the wide frame: the whole hill in one go, with the road curling around its foot and the Luberon plain running flat to the ridges behind. It is the picture that explains why the village sits where it does.

Vue sur Gordes comes in closer, and the subject changes completely. From the road you see a silhouette. From here you see a plan — how the houses actually pack together, the way the lanes curl around the rock instead of cutting through it, that the whole thing is one continuous piece of masonry rather than a collection of buildings. Both hold up large, because the detail is the subject; at 41×61 cm you can follow individual roof lines.

Brittany, where the light is the opposite

Provence gives you warm stone and hard shadows. Brittany gives you granite, tidal range, and a grey that is much harder to photograph well and much more rewarding when it works.

La Pointe Sauvage at the Pointe du Grouin is the exposed version — headland, open Channel, nothing softening it. L'Île Émeraude at Île Besnard is the same coast being gentle, with water that genuinely goes that colour over pale sand on a clear tide.

L'Archipel des Ebihens is the one that convinced me to keep flying this coast. At low tide the archipelago stops being islands and becomes a single drawn shape — sandbars linking rocks that are separate for most of the day. It is a photograph with a timetable.

The lakes

Three of these are still water, and still water is where an aerial camera stops describing land and starts describing reflection.

Le Palace au Bord de l'Eau on Lake Annecy is the most conventional image in the French set, and the one people respond to fastest — a building that was designed to be looked at, photographed from the one angle its architects never saw it from.

L'Île sur le Lac and La Passerelle du Lac at the Lac des Settons work the other way: small subjects, a lot of water, and the composition carried almost entirely by where the thing sits in the empty space around it. These are the ones I would hang unframed, large, on a pale wall.

The two that are about people

Not everything here is from the air. La 2CV au Bord du Lac is a blue Citroën on an empty road, and it is in the catalogue because it is the most French object I have ever pointed a camera at without staging anything. Le Village sous la Neige at Val d'Isère is the only winter photograph on the site.

The Harvest Moon sits in this collection too, though it belongs to no place in particular. It is the quietest frame in the catalogue and the one I would put in a bedroom.

All eleven are in the France collection, made to order on Enhanced Matte Art paper, framed or unframed. If you are deciding on size, this is the rule I use.