These photographs were made in Basel on a single day of extreme summer heat. People moved deliberately along the line between sun and shade, and fountains had become gathering points rather than decoration. Later that day I noticed leaves collecting beside the tram lines, months ahead of autumn. I cannot say from one afternoon whether the trees were responding to that day alone or to weeks of accumulated heat before it. What I can say is that the leaves changed how I read everything else I had shot. What began as a record of people finding relief from the heat became a record of something the city itself was doing under the same pressure.

I treated the images with high contrast, pushing exposed surfaces toward white and shadow toward blue black, to give some sense of the pressure of the day. Water is the exception. Wherever a fountain held its own colour, gold, amber, green, I kept it, since it was doing something different from the stone and pavement around it, offering relief rather than simply absorbing heat. The photographs do not try to represent the heat directly. They record what it rearranged: empty ground, occupied shade, water people reached for, and leaves let go before their season.