Four frames from three countries, shot years apart, and none of them is the picture the guidebook wants. Two are Sintra in flat midday sun. One is a Venice canal at night at whatever ISO the body would tolerate. One is a piece of Prague clockwork shot long after the crowd went home. Put them side by side and the common thread is obvious: every one of them was made by refusing the position everyone else was standing in.

Everybody photographs the statue. Almost nobody comes home with a photograph worth keeping. It sits in a stone niche at the corner of two narrow streets, roughly knee height on an adult, behind a wrought-iron grille that throws black scrollwork across every clean angle you might want. Point a camera at it straight on and you get a small dark bronze against wet grey limestone, correctly exposed and completely dead.