The Canon New F-1

in Brick Lane, In Spooky Season

The Canon New F-1 arrived in 1981, which by camera standards makes it roughly as new as the Magna Carta, but I have decided to overlook this, much as I overlook my own hairline. I bought mine at Bruno's Bildverkstad in Stockholm. The man behind the counter handed it over with the solemnity of someone passing on a family heirloom, or possibly a live grenade, and I walked out into the Swedish drizzle of Gamla Stan feeling like a war correspondent who had mislaid his war. What struck me first was the weight. The New F-1 is not so much a camera as a small piece of municipal infrastructure. It feels as if it was built to survive a building collapse, ideally with the photographer sheltering underneath it. I have since dropped it, knocked it against a lamppost, and once sat on it at a bus stop. Each time the camera came out of it entirely unbothered and I came out of it slightly bruised, which seems a fair summary of our relationship.

I now carry it through the rainy autumn streets of London Fields & Hoxton, where the weather has the grey persistence of a parking warden and everyone under thirty seems to be carrying either a Ramones tote bag or a sourdough starter. Mostly I shoot with the 35mm f/2.8, a modest, sensible lens that puts in a full day's work without fuss and never asks for anything in return. It catches the shine of wet pavements on Hoxton Street, the steamed-up windows of cafés that sell smashed avocados & coffee at the price of a reassuring pension, and the tremendous dignity of a man in a beanie trying to fold an umbrella that has plainly decided not to be folded. When the light fades, which in a London October happens at about twenty past two, I switch to the 50mm f/1.4. It is so bright and so forgiving that it can find a picture in conditions where I can barely find my own feet. In the gloom of a Shoreditch side street it turns sodium lamps and puddles into something close to poetry, and I am more grateful than I can reasonably express.

The real joy, though, is the shutter. In an age when phones take photographs with all the drama of a fridge door closing, the New F-1 gives you a firm, well-engineered clack, the sound of a thing being done properly. It is the noise an old Swiss banker might make when signing off a loan. Every press of the release makes me feel I have achieved something, even when the result is eleven frames of a pigeon's back and a bus that left just as I raised the camera. People turn round when they hear it, briefly puzzled, as if a respected Victorian institution had cleared its throat behind them. I like that very much. In a world that has made almost everything quieter, smaller, and more disposable, it is deeply cheering to own something that is loud, heavy, and built to outlast the Hoxton rain, the coffee prices, and very probably me……..