Rediscovering Einvaux Hill
Einvaux is a small village that sits in the North-East corner of France. If you type “Einvaux, France” on GoogleMaps, the result will give you a real idea of the place that I am going to talk about. We are deep in the French countryside: small villages in the middle of the fields and some small forests. If you look closer, you will notice a railway line. It links Nancy to Epinal, in the Vosges Mountains area. Here the line has to climb from the Meurthe River Valley to the Moselle River Valley. This means curves and ramps to climb or descent. For railroaders this place is known as the Einvaux Hill (la Côte d’Einvaux).
Now you have a geographic idea of the place. Einvaux Hill also has a strong meaning in my personal railroad photographic history. For a long time, this line was a railfanning heaven: old telegraphic poles, antique bridges and no catenaries. This was the right place to learn how to take pictures. I drove all around, I was looking for the right angle, the perfect composition and the nicest light. I was not alone on this. A good friend of mine, Vincent, helped me and guided me. In 2007, modernity arrived : catenaries, modern signaling, electric trains… This was no more “authentic” and no more interesting for my classical point of view.
slideshow : Einvaux Hill vignettes
Click on the picture to start the slideshow
In May 2008, I was back to Einvaux and its hill. Winter had been grey and cold, this day was warm and sunny. Once again I enjoyed to drive on small roads – I knew them so well – and to watch pretty little farms. Landscapes were the same but my personnal vision on Railroad Photography had changed. I was part of the newly created Images & Trains Project and I was trying to be more creative. I recently discovered Mashima Mitsuhide’s work on his native land, a portrait from Japan, from North to South. Mitsuhide’s vision gives the first role to landscapes, traditions and human beings. Train is secondary and you sometimes have to guess where it hides! I wanted to do a similar work in Einvaux Hill. This was a hardest challenge than I though!
Einvaux is an agricultural countryside. Wide spaces are used for crops and cattles. Spring was ending and it was drawing a green (from the wheat shoot) and yellow (from the canola flowers) patchwork. Some forests and tiny farms added some dark patches to this landscape. I had got the visual feelings and I just had to translate them to pictures. That was not an easy task as my vision was used to do wedgies where the train itself has the main role. When I read Mitsuhide’s book with this “environmental” approach, that looked so easy to do!
So I tried to forget the railroad and searched other subjects. I searched for elements of design like lines, textures, shapes and colours. I used depth of field to guide the reader’s eye to some details of the vegetation. Then I noticed how furrows in the fields were drawing lines, I realized how a little railroad crossing was a mix of textures… Einvaux Hill was showing another face to me. Actually it has always been like this. This was my vision that has evolved.
You can now discover some pictures that illustrates my new vision on Einvaux Hill.
