Untitled (Motorcycle: before sunrise). Lourdes, France, 2023.
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The second day. A Monday, AM:
Waking up on this morning in Lourdes before sunrise beat yesterday’s efforts by Brittany Ferries (classical music piped into my dark cabin well before dawn, approaching St Malo and a hot day on the road). Today, the pre-dawn light pulled me into consciousness—to the window to take some snaps of the unprepossessing, but secure, hotel carpark. I was reminded of Robert Frank’s Bute Montana, and Walker Evans’ before him—on the road across decades and generations.1.
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The journey was beginning to unfold within me, to guide me. I was living the dream. Not my father’s unfulfilled dream. Rather a dream which I realised I’d also held since my previous visits to the Pyrenees: Hitching (le stop); Skiing (where a former royal bodyguard did his best to get me, counter-intuitively, to ‘point my tits down the mountain’); Motorcycling, (when I’d come down to check out Hairy Arsed Builder and Rodders on their newly acquired Duo-Discus (a sailplane) in the mountains around Jaca). These all seemed lifetimes ago.
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Today also felt different: the mountains promised something more intangible than the piped music—or the damp pre-dawn sea air of the harbour at St Malo—had anticipated. An edgy promise was on offer: invoked by the prospect of high mountain passes.
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Also at least one new country: I needed to be near Girona, in Spain, by nightfall. Due to yesterday’s decisions the Pyrenees were now in the way—a new journey seeping into me, by increments. Wending my way out of Lourdes (cautiously, as still on the wrong side of the road—it’s the settings offs and pauses that get you), and away to the south-east. I meandered in the general direction of Andorra—pausing to get my bearings, and to let Ms Google get hers, and to chip in via my earpieces.
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A fork in the road came up, I instinctively took the righthand, less busy, looking one. It was soon clear that the inexorable slow rising, characteristic of an about-to-be-steep-and-windy, mountain road was of some import. Folk were cycling up it, some quite quickly. It turned out that I was on a famous climb in the Tour de France—up and over the Col du Tourmalet. There is something abstract about climbing a mountain pass on a motorcycle: the landscape is rugged, yet you pass through it relatively un affected by the uncompromising unremitting nature of the continual climb. The cyclists took breathers, and, no doubt, a different view. I kept going, my biggest risk being a topple if I stopped on a gravel pull-off.
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At the top of the climb was the kind of shambolic semi-occlusion of buildings and attractions that seem to assemble in such locations, something I last experienced on the Stelvio in 2016. This was no different, and near the top was a roadworks—this pass is VERY well maintained—and a salutation on the tarmac, a spray-canned: ‘Tu Est Libre!’.
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It was late Monday morning, I was at the top of the Tourmalet, in the sunshine. I’d left home in Shropshire on Saturday afternoon: Libre? Free? Moi?2 It was starting to feel that way, at last.
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Untitled (Interior: after sunset). Lourdes, France, 2023.
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Notes:
See: Frank, R. (1958). The Americans (2000 Ed.). London: Thames and Hudson. This seminal book was an early influence one me, even before I became a photography student in the 1980’s. Ground breaking in its time, this work still contains valuable lessons on photographic form, methods and editing processes. Its forbear, Walker Evans’ American Photographs, is also an essential monograph for the serious photographic practitioner.
Old English frēo (adjective), frēon (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch vrij and German frei, from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to love’, shared by friend.