I have written a book. These things happen.
It started, as most of my trouble does, with sitting down. Ten years of parking at the Feydeau car park, walking into town not especially fast, finding a bench or a terrace table or a warm rock at the Jardin Extraordinaire, and staying there while the city got on with its afternoon. Somewhere along the way I noticed that this was not a failure to do street photography properly. It was the method. The book makes the argument at full length: the best street photographs come not from hunting but from inhabiting. Find the spot. Sit down. Let the place come to you.
IJM on the Streets — Nantes is nine chapters and a decade of film. The Bouffay at night on HP5+, squinting and hoping at 1/15th of a second. The empty Cafés Richard espresso cup that turned out to be the whole thesis. The café above the weir at the Chaussée des Moines, where the cake had absolutely nothing to do with how fondly I remember the day, or so I keep telling myself. Two seasons at the Jardin Extraordinaire. The year I refused to photograph the cathedral until the banners came down. And the Île de Nantes in 2016, with Kate, aged seven, and her Olympus Trip 35 — her photos turned out better than just fine, and it is all on record now.
Regular readers will recognise some of these days. The blog posts were the field notes; the book is what they were quietly adding up to. It is also, I should warn you, a book that contains opinions about coffee, cake, comfortable shoes, and why 36 frames are a pair of spectacles rather than a constraint. Everything was shot on film — HP5+, Pan 100, Kentmere 400, RPX 400, APX 100 — and developed in my kitchen, and the missed focus stayed in where it earned its place. The candles in the cathedral are slightly blurred. They are staying that way.
The book is available now as a PDF ebook in the shop, for the price of a few good espressos. Thirty-odd black and white photographs, ten years, one city. Free to read in any café you like.
On est bien là.
P.S. Kate has been informed that she features prominently. She has requested royalties. Negotiations continue over tea.