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o what if the pictures

don’t come out? Putting

the needs of this article

aside, I don’t mind if the

films are blank. Photography is

very different for me these days.

It’s gone beyond results and

has evolved into a process –

a practice – of focusing on life.

Call it a meditation or a practice

in mindfulness. Handling my

lovely, well-worn, old Leica has

also focused my attention, not

just on what I’m seeing, but how

I see and how I feel about my

subject: about life.

Making physically real,

analogue images is such a

whole-body and emotionally

engaging process: loading,

developing, cutting up and

contacting the film, marking up

the images to print, then loading

the negatives into the scanner or

the enlarger, and working

through all the other physically

involved stages to get to the final

print. Even then, there are no

guarantees that the latent

images will come out as

intended, although the

process of working towards

them makes a lasting impression.



MY ‘NEW’ 1931 LEICA CAMERA © ANGELICA LEV Y EPHRAUMS

I asked my daughter Angelica to take a picture of me using the camera. As a 12-year-old she doesn’t get film,

but she does get the concept of being paid to take a publishable picture (what happened to royalty-free

images?). The retro look to this image, although made digitally, is very much grounded in the days of film.

ADRIAN AND FUDGE

This picture of my photo workshop business partner and his dog is one of the first I shot with my ‘new’ Leica. Not bad for an 84-year-old camera,

except the slight light leakage (faint banding in the sky) needs fixing. I was drawn to the humour of this dog-on-a-plinth scene. Adrian jokes that

Fudge is the real boss in his family.

Unlike digital, there is no

history button to undo mistakes,

or to be wise after the event.

Analogue photography is a

lesson in life. Talking of which,

I’ve just developed the films.

They’ve come out! But most of

the images are very average.

What could I expect after just

two rolls of film? It took me 400+

frames to inhabit the mindset

of a Leica Monchrom digital

camera I was recently loaned.

All photography takes practice

• it’s a continual practice.

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