The Canon AE-1 Program

Birthday Camera 2026

The Canon AE-1 Program was designed in an era when the Japanese, having conquered the world's hi-fi cabinets, turned their attention to its sideboards. It still has the look of something meant to sit beside a Teasmade. Its shutter fires with the sound of a council bin lid meeting its destiny. Like every great machine of the early 1980s, it is entirely dead without a battery the size of a Polo mint, a fact I learned at eleven last night. By then I had also sat through the whole of Celebrity Traitors, a programme in which people you almost recognise wear knitwear that costs more than a family car, gather in a Scottish castle and accuse one another of treachery with the furrowed seriousness of a mayoral hearing. As television it is a crime against the medium. As a spectacle it is irresistible, which seems the usual relationship between the two.

So it feels only right that I set off this morning for Columbia Road to photograph London's Day of the Dead with a camera that has, in the technical sense, been raised from the grave, the 24, 35 and 50mm FD lenses rattling in my bag like spare bones in a crypt. Columbia Road on a festival day is London distilled: a row of tiny shops built for a population a foot shorter than ours, now heaving with marigolds, painted skulls and couples in coats so carefully matched they could only have been bought in a moment of weakness. I'll fortify myself at Campania, the old dairy that now serves the kind of pasta that silences grown men in mid-anecdote, which in London is a miracle on the scale of Lourdes. I'll look into the Royal Oak, a pub handsome enough to be listed twice. And I'll buy something I don't need at Hackney Essentials, whose name I generally take to be somewhat of a dare.

The 35mm will work the street. It's wide enough to hold a sugar-skulled face and the flower stall behind it, but not so wide that the people at the edges look as if they're going down a plughole. The 50mm is the lens every dad owned in 1983, and like most dads it is dependable, unflashy and happiest when nobody asks it to do anything ambitious. I'll keep it for the quiet moments: a parent adjusting a paper crown on a toddler whose expression says it would rather be anywhere else, possibly Belgium. The 24mm is reserved for Notting Hill, which approaches Halloween with the zeal of a convert. Expect more stucco terraces than seems structurally wise, draped in cobwebs of near-industrial density; skeletons scaling window boxes with more commitment than most of the austrian side of my family; and at least one front garden staged as a zombie massacre with the outstanding art direction of the West End theatre. Costing more than my first London flat, and considerably better lit.

When the supernatural palls, I'll take refuge in the pubs. First the Windsor Castle on Campden Hill, where the tiny doors and wooden partitions make you feel you have strayed into a Victorian's front room and ought to leave some sort of card. Then the Elgin on Ladbroke Grove, where I confidently expect to see Dracula defeated not by garlic or the cross but by a contactless card reader. Then on to the Pelican on All Saints Road, which will be rammed and wonderful, the two conditions being in London more or less the same thing. I'll end at Cépages with a glass of something French and serious, doing my best to look like a man who photographs for a living rather than one who learned to load his camera from Grainydays on YouTube.

Tomorrow brings the sausage parade in Hyde Park, a convocation of dachshunds numbering in the hundreds, many of them in costume. I have been anticipating it with an eagerness that in anyone else I would consider a symptom. I'm reliably told that some of the hounds will once again come dressed as hot dogs, which is either postmodernism at its purest or a cry for help, and I mean to find out which. I'll take the 35mm and get down to their level, since dachshunds are built close to the ground and I, regrettably, am not. I suspect my best frames will show the back of a dog's head as it trots firmly away from me, the universal response of the subject to the artist. I've procured four rolls of Kodak Portra 400.