A silver gelatin photograph — signed "Sidney T. Cothran Jr." at lower right and titled "Eiffel" at lower left — establishing that Sidney was also a photographer, and that he visited the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The subject is the interior spiral staircase of the tower, seen from directly below looking upward: a descending helix of metal steps winds upward through the tower's steel lattice framework, the geometry of the staircase creating a natural spiral that rises toward a circle of light at the top.
The photographic eye here is sophisticated. Sidney chose the most abstract possible view of the tower — not its exterior silhouette but its interior structure, not the famous form but the hidden geometry. He positioned himself at the base of the staircase, oriented the camera upward, and found the spiral. Of course he did. The spiral that appears throughout his entire visual practice — in pastel, ink, watercolor, clay — appears here too, in steel and in Paris.
The photograph is technically accomplished: the exposure is correctly balanced between the dark structural elements and the light zones of the glass ceiling above, the focus sharp throughout the depth of field. Sidney understood the camera as a tool for finding the world's visual structure, not merely recording its surface.
The title "Eiffel" is the most geographically specific work in the collection after the Colorado and Italian landscape titles, placing Sidney in Paris at some point in his life. Together with the Olive Tree, Puglia (356) dated 2013, this confirms that Sidney traveled internationally — a fact that adds context to the East Asian bamboo paintings and raises further questions about his travels and influences.