Discrete Pleasures: shooting From The French in the Rain
in praise of our photography in the rain……………
It must be said there is a particular kind of pleasure, unavailable to almost anyone under fifty, in standing at the windows of the French House on Dean Street in the middle of September with a camera that was built when Eisenhower was president and sports no light meter of any description. It rains in Soho in a way that it rains nowhere else — not so much falling as loitering, a sort of ambient dampness that gets into your collar and your cuffs and eventually, I am fairly certain, your bone marrow. And into all this you bring a roll of Ilford HP5, a film so obligingly forgiving that you can guess the exposure while holding yet another half of Breton cider and it will still come back looking like a photograph somebody meant to take. This is the entire point. You set the M3 to 1/60th at f/2, which is what you always set it to, and you tell yourself this is instinct rather than laziness, and the wonderful thing is that nobody can prove otherwise.
The M3 itself makes a noise when you press the shutter that I can only describe as expensive — a small, discreet, well-oiled thunk, like a Rolls-Royce door closing three streets away — and in a pub where mobile phones are banned and the beer comes in halves on principle, this is roughly the only sound anyone will forgive you for making. Meanwhile the light does something extraordinary. It comes through the windows all grey and secondhand, catches the smoke that isn’t there any more and the condensation that certainly is, and HP5 takes this feeble offering and turns it into grain the size of gravel and a tonal range that suggests everyone inside has recently done something disreputable. Which, given the building’s history — Gaston Berlemont, de Gaulle’s lot, Dylan Thomas mislaying an entire manuscript under a barstool — they very probably have. You will get home soaked, with thirty-six frames of which four are usable, and you will feel a contentment entirely out of proportion to the achievement. I have never been able to explain this to anyone. I have stopped trying.
