Leica R6.2

I mentioned the Minolta XD, but I think I got away with it…….

Friday 22nd May, Paris

Let me be clear from the outset. The R6.2 is not a camera. It is a covenant. While the unwashed jab at their plastic Japanese boxes that focus for them — the indignity — I meter by hand. I focus slowly, deliberately, like a man who has read his Cartier-Bresson and would very much like you to ask him about it. Mechanical shutter. German engineering. Built, one assumes, by monks. I did not so much purchase this camera as accept a calling.

Each frame is a meditation. I do not take photographs; I receive them. The viewfinder is a chapel. The shutter, when it falls, makes a sound so refined that lesser men have wept. £600, and worth every penny, because what price the soul?

Then I get the rolls out of the tank.

There is light. Where there should not be light. A lurid orange weal creeping across my masterpiece — my devastating study of a Parisian café in the rain — as though the negative had been lightly toasted by God Himself in a moment of editorial disagreement. I tell myself it is atmosphere. I tell myself Robert Frank would have killed for this. I tell myself a great many things, in the manner of a man reassuring himself.

It is, of course, the light seals. The foam. The forty pence of crumbling sponge that the monks, in their German wisdom, declined to make eternal. Three decades on, it has perished into a sort of black tar, and my cathedral of optical purity now admits the day like a colander. The cult of craftsmanship, undone by a material with the lifespan of a yoghurt.

I could replace the seals myself for the cost of a sandwich. I will not. To do so would be to admit that the failing was mechanical rather than spiritual, and that the camera, for all its liturgy, is in the end a box that needs its draught excluders changing. So instead I shoot another roll. I commune. I receive. And I wait, with the patience of the truly devout, for the orange to come.

Digested review, digested: a £600 act of worship, ruined by 40p of foam. Bring back the plastic box.