The first letter

I’ve had a couple of hundred people signed up to hear from me for a while now, and I’ve sent them almost nothing. That isn’t modesty. It’s indecision. I could never work out what a newsletter from me was supposed to be, and rather than send something shapeless I sent nothing at all, which is its own kind of rude.

I think I’ve got it now. Once a month, something like what follows. Part of it is just a list of what went up here, in case you missed something. The rest is the bit I wouldn’t put in a post: what I’m actually working on, what’s gone wrong, and what’s happening in the shop.

Here’s the first one. Published here so you can see what you’d be getting before you decide whether you want it.

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September

Last Friday the last of the Normandy posts went out, and that was that. Four essays, one long day in 2019 and one afternoon in 2026, and I only worked out this summer that they were ever the same piece of work. I’d gone back after seven years thinking I was starting something. Turns out I was finishing it.

Sixteen photographs in the end. I keep saying sixteen. There’s a seventeenth sitting on a disk, shadows across the deck at Pegasus Bridge, and I still haven’t exported it, and I couldn’t honestly tell you why. Some frames you sit on. It’ll come out or it won’t.

What I didn’t expect about Normandy is how ordinary it all is now. Car parks. Ice creams. Roses planted along the foot of a casemate wall by somebody who presumably just likes roses. I went looking for weight and found a Tuesday afternoon, and after a while I stopped fighting it, because the Tuesday afternoon was the photograph.

What went up this month

The Merville Battery (4 September). A place I photographed in 2019 and then never wrote about, for seven years. Too much history kills the history.

Normandy, 1944 — All Sixteen (7 September). The whole series in one place, and the moment I realised the two trips were one project.

Pointe du Hoc (11 September). Craters, concrete, and six hundred thousand visitors a year. The emptiness is the history, not a gap in my coverage.

Sainte-Mère-Église (18 September). A parachute on a church steeple, and a black plaque outside somebody’s front door that took me a while to properly read.

Utah Beach, and the road to Strasbourg (25 September). The last one. Same beach, two different armies, two months apart.

In the shop

The black and white prints have all moved onto Ilford or Baryta paper. No Fuji, no acrylic on that work any more. It took me about a month to decide and four minutes to actually do, which is roughly the ratio for most of my decisions.

The three colour photographs stay as they are, because they were made in colour and printing them otherwise would be a lie. Two from China, the canal at Shao Xing and a street food stall in Shenzhen at night, and one from ten minutes up the road, the basilica at Saint-Donatien with its towers going red against a black sky. They’re on Fuji paper and they’ll stay there.

And I’ve brought the prices down. The cheapest way into a print used to be €143.99 and is now €99.99. I’d like to tell you that was strategy. It was mostly somebody looking over my shoulder at the shop and saying the thing a normal person would say.

There are downloads as well, at €39.99. A full-resolution file, and you take it to whichever printer you like and put it in whichever frame you like. Some people would much rather choose their own paper and their own moulding than have me choose for them, and I’ve no argument with that at all. It’s a cheaper way in and it’s the same photograph.

People do ask what any of this is for, given you’ve already seen the photograph on a screen and it cost you nothing. Fair question. A screen shows you an image and then shows you the next one. A wall gives you something you have to live with, which is harder and better. What ends up on it is a bit of somewhere I stood, usually on a day I hadn’t planned to be there. That’s all it is. I’ve come round to thinking that’s quite a lot.

The shop is here, if you want a look.

Next

11 November. That’s what the Normandy work has been walking toward all along and I’ve still no real idea what I’m doing for it. If you’ve a thought, just reply. I read them all. There aren’t that many.

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That’s the shape of it. Once a month, about as long as what you’ve just read.

If you’d like it, the box below will do it.

If you’re already on the list, you don’t need to do anything. This is already coming to you.

If you'd rather have one of these on a wall than a screen — prints from €99.99, Ilford or Baryta paper, made by WhiteWall in Berlin. The shop →