Technical details: my Ricoh GR1s now dead, I took out the Leica Mini that my friend Jean-Francois had given me a few years previously. This is actually a very cheap camera made many years ago in Japan for Leica. It has crazy amounts of distortion, but I kind of like images it produces. I usually put slow film in it like FP4plus. Walking to the swimming pool one mid-day I found this fellow on the steps. I took his photograph. He didn’t notice me.
Thanks to a passing mention on my favourite philosophical corner of the internet photographic Universe the measurement on the beam has been moved away from zero (with a light fall, with lumps, at 5:30, as policeman Fox would say). But as these days I’m trying to keep to my promise of publishing at least one photograph per week with a short text does mean that my longer articles are swamped. So here’s small list…
Sergio Larrain and Valparaiso
Eugène Atget, his life
Atget’s legacy
Josef Koudelka at Beaubourg
I was happy to read that Film Ferrania have almost resolved their manufacturing problems. Shooting unique special films like their P30 emulsion is one of the best reasons I can think of to shoot film. Here’s my article about P30:
Discovering Ferrania’s P30 film
And about that film/digital thing? I think I still agree with most of this.
More longer articles to come before the end of the summer, I hope. There’s Geoff Dyer’s excellent “The pleasure of looking at good photographs” which I mean to say something about…
Walking past one of Paris’ most famous landmarks, I noticed this shadow on the street…
After reading about Eugene Atget’s life I was more than little be interested to visit once again the parks and gardens he photographed in. They are almost all still there and have not changed much. In the last hundred years in Luxembourg gardens they have changed the chairs, but that’s about it.
St. Cloud is an interesting place. It’s easy to get to from here, around half an hour by bus from Porte d’Orleans. There was once a palace there which burned down during the Prussians war at the end of the 19th century. On one side there is the Seine; at the beginning of the 18th century this location was a favoured spot for country houses for rich Parisians. The village of St. Cloud today is quite picturesque. Unfortunately, today it hemmed in on all sides by motorways and elevated flyovers and one is never far from the rumble of traffic. But the park is still intact, and one can still walk rom the town to the park without crossing a motorway. Inside the park, in fact, one can walk for miles, and there are even forest trails, as much as one could hope for in the middle of an enormous city.
The statues that Atget photographed are still there. I brought with me a roll of slow, fine-grained film (still much faster than the film Atget used of course). I took pictures with my Leica. Certainly, there is no way a small portable camera such as a Leica can produce anything like an image from a heavy view camera, but at least there were no pixels involved, and I tried to imagine the photographs I was taking before I took them. There is still a special feeling in this park (I think I prefer it to Sceaux) and I’ll try to return there more often.