It was a Friday in May. I received a Facebook message from an old friend. Well, I mean, not ancient, but somebody I have known for 15 years. He was my Director of Music when I played for the Wind Band in Cholet. We have both moved on since then, but still regularly keep in touch. I actually took some photos for him and for his Brass Quintet Arabesque, and even stood in for my old horn teacher playing Christmas carols one year. The rotundness of me and the big white beard had nothing to do with it.
Anyway, he messaged me. Right back on track now. He asked if I would like to go and listen to them play in Nantes. I of course said yes, and told my wife that I would be out. Fortunately I was given permission by “she who must be obeyed.”
His name is Hervé Dubois, tuba player, conductor, and a very good friend. And if you can’t take photos for a friend, then why even bother. I have a lot to thank him for. Not only is he a good friend, but it was through him and Quintet Arabesque that my photography first found a purpose beyond pointing a camera at things and hoping for the best. I did a full photoshoot for them at a concert in Guérande, and to my genuine surprise, those images ended up on the sleeve of their CD. Which means somewhere out there, pressed onto a disc, is proof that I occasionally do something right. More than that, Arabesque gave me a real taste for documenting music: not performing it, but being inside it with a camera. If you want to know more about Hervé, I wrote a portrait piece about him a few years back, and there is also The American Concert if you want the full picture of my ongoing relationship with this particular brass quintet.
I arrived early, as I tend to when I have a camera with me. Nantes was still in afternoon light, and the neighbourhood around the Basilique Saint-Donatien has exactly the kind of streets that reward patience: old stone, heavy shadows, ironwork that throws patterns across walls when the sun catches it at the right angle.
I have been trying something deliberately different with my photography lately. Rather than documenting what is in front of me, I have been looking for what the light is doing. The way shadow doubles the shape of a wrought iron gate on the stone behind it. The texture of centuries-old masonry caught in raking sunlight, where every crack and grain becomes its own small landscape. A wooden door under a fan-shaped iron canopy, lit just enough to pull it out of the surrounding dark. The photographs almost make themselves when you start looking that way; you just have to be in the right place and wait for the light to do its work.
By the time I made my way to the basilica, the sun was lower and the facade was glowing. The equestrian statue out front stood in silhouette against it, which felt appropriately dramatic for a saint’s festival.
Inside, the space had already been transformed. The organisers had bathed the apse in deep red stage lighting, and against the white stone of the neo-Gothic vaulting, the effect was extraordinary: ancient and modern at once, sacred and theatrical. The stained glass windows in the choir, normally gentle with colour, became something stranger under that wash of red.
The programme for the Festival Saint Donatien was built around the relationship between music and place. Quintet Arabesque were performing alongside the cathedral organist and, this time around, a choir as well. The idea was simple and quietly brilliant: drone footage of the basilica, filmed from outside and above, played on a large screen while the music filled the interior beneath. You could see the building from the sky while sitting inside it. Something about that shift in perspective changed the way you heard the music, and the way you felt the space around you.
We were asked not to applaud between pieces, and to let the whole evening unfold as a kind of meditation. It was the right call. In a space like that, with light and music working together at that level, the silence between movements became part of the performance. You sat with it. The acoustics of the stone carried each note long after it had been played, and for a while you stopped thinking about anything at all.
I had my camera with me, as I always do, and I tried to photograph what I was seeing. The difficulty, and the interest, was that the light inside was almost entirely the red of the stage wash and the cool blue filtering through the high windows. There was very little middle ground, and no safety net. You either committed to what was in front of you or you put the camera down. I chose to commit, and some of the results are not what I would call technically accomplished. But a few of them feel like the room actually felt.
Afterwards, the great red doors opened onto the square, and the audience spilled back out into the evening. I stood for a moment in the doorway looking back: the dark interior, the rows of empty pews, the faint glow of the apse still red behind the screen. Then I turned around, and there was the city again.
The streets were quiet on the walk back to the car. Nantes at night has a different quality to it: the stone buildings hold the warmth of the day, and the streetlights pool in places that the sun never quite reaches. I kept shooting. That is the thing about looking for light rather than subjects; the light does not stop being interesting just because the concert has ended.
Hervé and I ended up in a pub, as these evenings generally do. Two old friends catching up in person, which is a very different thing from a Facebook message, and a much better one. The evening had started with a notification on a screen and ended somewhere warmer and louder, with proper conversation that goes sideways in the best possible way. Full circle, really.
On the way back to the car, I stopped in the street and looked up. The twin towers of the basilica were still lit up in red against the black sky, visible above the rooftops from two streets away. It looked less like a church and more like something you might dream.
I took a photograph. Of course I did.
