On the Leica Standard in SoHo (London)

The Leica Standard is the camera you buy when you have decided that money, comfort, and the ability to tell whether anything is actually in focus are luxuries beneath a serious man. Stripped of a rangefinder the way a monk is stripped of his worldly goods, it asks you to estimate distance by eye — a skill last reliably possessed by Edwardian artillery officers — and then commit, with the irreversible solemnity of a man signing a confession. Carrying one through Soho, I felt less like a photographer than a penitent, which is roughly the correct emotional register for a district that has spent a century selling people things they will regret by morning.

Soho obliges the scale-focuser by being almost entirely composed of subjects between three and ten feet away, most of them moving and several of them on a fire exit they should not be using. I would frame a fishmonger on Berwick Street, twist the lens to what I judged to be six feet, and discover on the contact sheet that I had instead achieved a tender, slightly out-of-focus portrait of his elbow. The Leica’s defenders call this “discipline.” They are the same people who describe a cold bath as “bracing” and a four-hour opera as “a journey,” and they should be watched closely at parties.

What the Standard does possess, in the manner of an aristocrat who has lost the estate but kept the bone structure, is an unhurried mechanical dignity that makes everything around it look slightly cheap, including you. The shutter does not so much fire as concede the point, with a noise like a librarian finally agreeing to let you take the book out. In a Frith Street doorway, between a jazz club and a place that sold things I chose not to itemise, the little machine clicked away with the serene indifference of an object that was being smuggled across the Pyrenees while your phone’s ancestors were still amoebae.

By the end of the afternoon I had exposed a roll of thirty-six and was confident, in the way one is confident about a horse one has never seen run, that perhaps four of them were sharp. This, I have come to understand, is the entire transaction the Leica Standard offers: it removes every modern certainty and hands back, in exchange, the exquisite suspense of not knowing whether you are a photographer or merely a well-dressed man pointing brass at strangers. Soho, which has been running precisely that confidence trick on visitors since the eighteenth century, took one look at me and recognised a kindred spirit.