Jean Paul Jacob, 1946 – 2026
I have written this article a thousand times in my head. Monsieur Jacob was my father-in-law, and he taught me a lot of my French by arguing with me. This is the version that finally made it onto the page.
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This One Is Mine: Shooting a Praktica MTL3 Again
My son was off to forge a knife, so I dropped him at Le Gâvre with a Praktica MTL3 and a roll of RPX 400 and went looking for something to photograph. It is the camera I learnt on in 1987: same model, same shutter noise, a different decade. The plan for the rest of the day was lunch, flowers and confession.
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The first letter
A couple of hundred people signed up to hear from me and I sent them almost nothing, because I could never work out what a newsletter from me was supposed to be. I think I’ve got it now. Here’s the first one, published so you can see what you’d be getting.
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Utah Beach, and the road to Strasbourg
Last of three, and the one that surprised me. I went to Utah expecting the American story and came away with a French one, and I didn’t work that out until I got the pictures on a screen and started reading the writing on things. Two armies, two months apart, same sand.
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Sainte-Mère-Église
Forty minutes up the road from Pointe du Hoc, and a completely different kind of remembering. At Pointe du Hoc it’s in the ground. Here it’s on the houses, on the church, in the street names — and on a black plaque outside somebody’s front door that took me a while to properly read.
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Pointe du Hoc
Back to Normandy after seven years, and this time west into the Manche. I got out of the car at Pointe du Hoc at twenty to four and back into it at Utah just after seven. This is the first of three posts from that one afternoon — craters, concrete, and about six hundred thousand other visitors a year.
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Normandy, 1944 — All Sixteen
Two trips, seven years apart, and I only worked out this week that they were ever the same project. Sixteen photographs between Pegasus Bridge and Utah Beach, all in black and white now, all live in the shop.
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The Merville Battery
I went to the Merville Battery in August 2019, between Pegasus Bridge in the morning and the war cemetery at Ranville in the afternoon. I wrote about both of those and never wrote about this, and the photographs sat on a disk for seven years. This is the part of that day I had let go of.
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A Family Is a Timeline: Weddings, White Hair, and the Roads of Normandy
On the passage of time: through a family, through a landscape, and through the photographs we leave behind. On the 8th of August I watched Maureen marry Maciej.
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Film, words, and a new shop
For forty years, I have been taking photographs. Mostly on film. Mostly in the Vendée, Nantes, and the UK, with a few detours to places like China. For…
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Jardin Extraordinaire: This Time I Actually Looked at the Map
I headed back out with the Canon AE1 Program to capture more of the Voyage à Nantes, this time at the Jardin Extraordinaire—a hidden garden carved into an abandoned quarry. With the car at 48°C, it was sweltering, but the wandering through Chantenay and an unplanned brewery visit made the day worth every frame.
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