09/07/2026 — Canon AE1 Program — HP5+ pulled to 100 ASA, Rodinal 1+25
It was 46°C in the car when I set off. 37°C when I got out at Feydeau. 40°C by the time I reached Place Graslin. July in Nantes. Definitely on the warm side. It was already 19h.
I came out later than planned, hoping for some relief from the heat. I was with the AE1 and not the Nikon FE; I still need to get batteries for it. Today wasn’t about speed. Did I say it was a tad warm? Today was for the V.A.N.
Le Voyage à Nantes strings installations, curiosities and surprises along a green line painted on the pavements of the city. This year’s theme is the earth. I was just doing the walk. Not all of it: I didn’t want to melt.
The thing about a green line on a black and white film is that it isn’t green any more. It’s just a line. Which turns out to be fine, because the streets of Nantes are full of lines going the same way — tram rails, drainage channels, the joints between the cobbles — and by the end of the evening I’d stopped being able to tell which ones were the art.
On the way to Place Graslin, I came across La Machine du Sacré by Ali Cherri: the kind of thing you walk past, then stop and walk back to. It looked like a packing case. An open wooden frame, wings and a head strapped to it, and rising from the whole thing trumpet structures: like organ pipes, or the civil defence sirens you see on poles in towns across France.
You can’t photograph it from outside. There isn’t an outside. It’s all frame — uprights, cross-braces, diagonals — so whatever you point the camera at, you’re shooting through timber at something else. In the end that’s what I went for: the carved wing seen between two posts, with the square going about its business behind it. A woman walked through the gap at the right moment and gave the whole thing a scale I couldn’t have arranged.
I followed the green line like an ecologist addicted to coke.
Place Graslin had a VAN installation I’d been wanting to see: Fossil Opera by Théo Mercier. Giant ammonites erupting from compacted sand right in front of the Opéra, rising out of the ground and dragging up rubble from Nantes building sites alongside half-buried cars playing opera from their interiors. I could see what it was going for. The earth giving up what’s underneath. The old city surfacing through the new.
What I was after, photographically, was the texture of the fossilised sand and some depth of field through the forms. The installation’s cars kept getting in the way. They’re part of the piece, I know. But they weren’t what I was looking for.
Having now seen the negatives, I owe the cars an apology. There’s a frame of a saloon with its roof under a heap of broken paving and an ammonite curling up behind it, and it does more than any of my careful texture studies. Sometimes the thing that’s in your way is the photograph. Annoying, but there we are.
The one I actually went there for came out too: crouched low with the rubble in the foreground and the ribbing filling the right-hand side, the street running away to the left into the haze. Judge for yourself.
I nearly popped into the Café Molière for a coffee, then saw the time and thought better of it. Onwards.
I found a spot to sit in the garden of the Natural History Museum. No cars. No traffic. I couldn’t hear the city. I felt calm.
I’ve been thinking about the last few months. I’m not suggesting I’ve turned a corner, but something has changed. My mental health has certainly improved since my sick leave; I’m not sure by how much, but at least I don’t want to kill myself, and my sleep is better despite the hotter summer. I’ll take it.
There was a woman a few benches along reading a book with her back to me, and I took the photograph before I’d decided to. It’s the only frame from the whole evening with a person in it who isn’t just passing through, and it’s the one I keep coming back to. She had the better idea. Sit down, open a book, let the city get on with it.
The rest of the garden did what gardens do. An iron lamp standard with flowers cast into the top of it, the leaves behind going soft. Empty restaurant tables laid for a service that hadn’t started, wine glasses catching what was left of the sun.
Time to continue my walk through town. Everything was exactly how I needed it to be.
I went to the Musée Dobrée looking for Champ/Contrechamp: thirty glass eyes fixed to the wall, all pointed at whoever walks in. The work is Ali Cherri’s; the same artist, as it turns out, whose winged installation I’d photographed an hour earlier at Place Félix-Fournier. I found myself in one of the nicer parts of Nantes, which was doing its best to be charming despite it being bin day and the road works being absolutely everywhere. I took a couple of shots outside and went in looking for the eyes. They weren’t where I expected them to be. I’d obviously misread the map. Bugger.
Somewhere inside, thirty glass eyes were presumably doing their job just fine.
I kept going through the museum gardens instead, where the benches, despite being rusted iron, were actually quite comfortable. I looked at the building itself, trying to find details, trying to find angles. The old part doesn’t want to be photographed. It’s all hard stone and small windows and it sits there looking like somewhere that wouldn’t let you in even if you had a ticket.
Then the light hit the museum windows in a way that gave me what I was looking for. Not the glass eyes. But something. The new wing is a great glass gable, and at that hour it had stopped being a window and started being a mirror — a staircase hanging in mid-air, clouds stacked behind it, trees coming up from the bottom of the frame the wrong way round. Thirty glass eyes I couldn’t find, and one enormous one I walked straight into.
I went back the way I had come, past the fossils again. Half the city seemed to be watching the France–Morocco game through café windows. I didn’t stick around.
The light had gone long and orange by then and the terraces were filling up. A wine shop with On peut rater sa vie mais pas sa cave across the front, which is either good advice or a warning depending on the week you’ve had. And on a wall somewhere between there and the river, a paste-up: Vouloir le bonheur c’est déjà le bonheur. Someone had gone at it with a marker and added et vain underneath. Nantes doesn’t let a nice sentiment stand unchallenged, and on the whole I think that’s healthy.
Strangely, I ended up back at the pub. Quelle Surprise. The John McByrne, where I seem to end up each time. I found a place to eat, and then drove home.
0% Guinness all the way. You still need the loo, but you’re not too drunk to find it.
One of those frames — the ammonites, the pavement, the whole improbable collision of deep time and a Nantes afternoon — is available as a print. It comes with no explanation, which seems right for something that old. See the print →
Canon AE1 Program. HP5+ rated at 100 ASA, developed in Rodinal 1+25 for 5 minutes 30 at what I am fairly sure was more than 20°C. The negatives came out dense enough to stand a spoon up in. Two stops of extra exposure will do that, and no amount of pulled development takes it back — but the shadows are wide open and the contrast is gentle, which in 40°C evening light is not the worst trade I’ve made.
Any photo on this site is available as a print. → Ask me.