The Emperor’s New Light Meter
You have met him, at dinner parties, droning between the hummus and the cheeseboard — convinced that strapping eleven hundred grammes of Wetzlar brass around his neck will, by some miracle of capillary osmosis, transmute him from a quantity surveyor from Penge into Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yet the Leica M6 exists for no purpose other than to irrigate this delusion, and so it was that in the broiling August of 2004 I found myself watching a small battalion of such men deploy theirs along the banks of the Seine, the red dots glinting like the inflamed pustules of some newly revealed collective bourgeois ailment.
The occasion was Paris Plage, Mayor Delanoë’s annual act of municipal lunacy, in which several thousand tonnes of sand were trucked in at ruinous expense and tipped onto a dual carriageway so that Parisians, living within four hours of an actual sea, could instead recline beside a river the approximate colour and consistency of cooled consommé, beneath palm trees in pots, and persuade themselves they were on the Côte d’Azur rather than parked atop the Voie Georges-Pompidou inhaling the exhaust of the 4×4s rerouted onto the Rue de Rivoli.
In short, a fiction; a beach that was a road, beside a sea that was and remains a river, photographed by men who are not photographers. The symmetry is almost beautiful.
Into this carnival of self-deception, then, the M6 — and I shall be scrupulously fair, which is to say grudging. The thing is a marvel of obstinate refusal. It will not focus for you; it offers instead a little rangefinder patch, a ghostly second image you must shimmy into alignment by hand like a drunk attempting to thread a needle on the deck of a ferry. It will not advance the film for you; you must crank it, with the thumb, in a gesture of such tactile smugness that you can practically hear your arteries hardening with satisfaction. And the shutter — ah, the shutter. Where a Japanese camera goes KER-CHUNK like a vending machine dispensing regret, the M6 emits a sound so discreet, so post-coitally hushed, that one’s subjects on the sand never knew they had been immortalised mid-yawn, mid-scratch, mid-application of Ambre Solaire to a torso that should have been issued a parental advisory.
The meter, mercifully, works; a pair of arrows in the finder, idiot-proof, which is just as well given this member of the clientele. And the 35mm Summicron-M — for here I must abandon the sneer and stand briefly, hat in hand — is simply one of the finest objects ever ground by human hands for the unworthy. Wide open at f/2 it renders the misting fountains and the parasols and the appalling Lycra with a clarity so surgical, a fall-off into the out-of-focus so creamy and forgiving, that even a deckchair full of sunburnt accountancy looks, for a thirtieth of a second, like art. The thing sees the lie of the Paris Plage and renders it more truthfully than the truth. It flatters the fraud. It is the perfect lens for the perfect sham.
And here is the part that curdles in the throat: the photographs came out magnificently. Damn them. Every one. Sharp where it mattered, soft where it dreamed, the sand glowing, the Seine for once not looking like a crime scene from a half remembered Maigret novel. I have spent four paragraphs assuring you that this camera is a fetish object for the deluded and the moneyed, and every word stands — but I would mortgage a relative to own one. That is the M6’s final, unforgivable trick: it convinces you the emperor has no clothes, then sells you the emperor.
Verdict: A beautiful instrument, wasted on Penge, redeemed by Paris, and worth every penny your bank has…….
