Professional photographer in Luxembourg
Brexit in Luxembourg
From January 31st 2020, at midnight, the United Kingdom and the European Union parted ways after 47 years and the British community in Luxembourg marked the moment with deep sadness. I joined them to see how the Brexit looks from Luxembourg.
It feels a bit weird to come back to the blog with a sad event, but it was a historic moment and I simply had to document it.
I started the evening at the church of St Alphonse on rue des Capucins, where the Anglican Church of Luxembourg organised a Brexit vigil, together with British Immigrants Living In Luxembourg (BRILL) asbl, Pulse of Europe, English-speaking Catholics and Europa-Union.
As you can imagine, the atmosphere was pretty sad. Everything started with a few bagpipe songs, followed by a short recital by David Pike.
From there, I rushed to the European Investment Bank in Kirchberg, where I knew they will remove the UK flag from the group of flags in front of the bank, at midnight. Luckily, I got there 10 minutes before the removal.
I started to set up my camera for the darkness and, few minutes later, the UK flag started its descendance, which only lasted for a minute or so.
After I knew that I got the classic photo done, I felt like gambling the moment for a bit. In such short events like these, you can’t really afford to try different things, because you can easily miss the shot if you get unlucky. But I kept an eye on the screen while shooting, I saw the photos from above, so I felt confident to try my luck for the next 10 seconds. And that’s how I shot the next image, which is also the cover of the article.
As the flag went down, you could’ve cut the tension with a knife. No sound for over five minutes. People still couldn’t believe that Brexit really happened. I couldn’t believe it either.
As a sign, I noticed that the wind simply stopped and the rest of the flags stopped waving, while the mast of the UK flag remained empty.
And that was it.
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