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“He was some kind of a man” — Orson Welles at the cinematheque

“He was some kind of a man” — Orson Welles at the cinematheque

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Last weekend I went to see the Orson Welles expo at the cinematheque. The show traces Welles’ entire cinematic career, from Hollywood wunderkind to itinerant filmmaker and advertiser of wine and cameras. I loved it.

There are many good artefacts in there from his career. A series of funhouse mirrors setting up the shootout in Lady From Shanghai; the microphone used for the famous War of The Worlds radio broadcast. There is a big poster of that famous photograph of Welles as Harry Lime from The Third Man looking down the through the Viennese sewers. The movie is set in post-war Vienna, and I was lucky enough to see it for the first time actually in Vienna, when I travelled there as a student in the early 1990s. And many little things that I didn’t know; for instance, Welles had lined up a complete production of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ but it was cancelled at the last minute by RKO. He loved costumes and make-up; one of his earliest roles he played an extravagantly aged old man.

the young man as an old man

Wonderfully, at the exit just as you leave the show is a screen showing clips from Welles’ films, including the immortal final sequence from Touch of Evil where Marlene Dietrich intones in her smoky German baritone that he was “Some kind of a man”.

He was some kind of a man…

An excellent show!

Photographs for Tim

Photographs for Tim

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It’s now over a year since Tim’s passing. There is this story I need to tell:

On a cold, grey Saturday in December 2022, I took the metro to the other side of Paris to meet Tim’s friend, Jorge. Tim and Jorge met when Tim was studying in Paris. When Tim’s cancer returned, Jorge went to North Carolina to see Tim and his family. When he was there, Tim gave Jorge several rolls of bulk film to bring to back to Paris for me.

Jorge and I met up in a tiny café near where he worked. Soon after meeting, I realised that I had already seen his photographs: Tim had published them in Leicaphilia. You remember them, I am sure, in particular the guy with the mask on his head with two round eye-holes. Fantastic and mysterious and funny. On the cold winter morning, Jorge and I talked for maybe an hour or two about photography and many other things. I showed him a few of my own photographs on my telephone. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I think you need to get closer”. Looking at my photographs, I would have to agree. At the end, it was almost lunchtime, we parted company and Jorge handed me over three black bags on which were written ‘TMAX’ and ‘Kentmere’ on yellowing masking tape. Tim had said to me a few months previously: “This should keep you in film for a while” and indeed it seemed to be a lot. A quick calculation suggested that it was around 60 rolls of 36 exposures each. But it was bulk film, not already rolled into cartridges. I had never rolled bulk film into cassettes before.

Back on the other side of Paris, I went searching on the internet for a bulk roller and film cartridges, although I knew that at first I could just re-use a few of the old cassettes from film I was currently shooting. After developing and printing my own films for almost ten years now, bulk rolling was the ”final frontier”: something I had yet to try (there is still one thing left, I guess: mixing your own film developer from scratch. Not ready to go there yet). It was almost impossible to find good-quality metal cassettes: eventually, I tracked down an ebayer in … Kyiv, Ukraine. At one point many cameras were made there, and I supppose there must be mountains of film cassettes still lying around. The cartridges arrived early in the new year, and I couldn’t imagine the environment they must have come from. I did try loading one cassette without the bulk loader, in the darkroom at the Observatory. In the darkness, I spooled out what (I thought) was the right amount of film and prepared to put into the cassette. At that moment, the whole darkroom lit up. A notification on my telephone. Luckily, the light from the screen was partially blocked by my body and the film was undamaged.

By the end of December, I had rolled my first cassettes of Tim’s film. I did what I always do: I went for a walk around town and took photographs in the grey, shadowless winter light. This flat light is perfect for photography: no need to change any settings on the camera. But when I developed and scanned the first rolls them, I was disappointed to see the streets and buildings of Paris under a heavy curtain of grain. But I soon realised: this was obviously a message from Tim. On Leicaphilia he wrote (I am sure) thousands of words about the nature of film grain and how it was (mostly) different from electronic noise captured by digital detectors. Tim loved grain, and his images were bathed in it. Some of it real, some of it cooked up with software. I was not expecting TMAX (known to be a fine-grained film) to look like this, but perhaps the rolls had been too long in Tim’s freezer. I tried a few different developers (including one Tim sent me just before he died), but the grain remained. Obviously, this was Tim’s plan. It’s a message, it’s a message, I repeated to myself.

Soon, walking around with those rolls of film in my camera, I felt different. To start with, I knew that perhaps I shouldn’t care too much about getting the exposure or focus exactly right: with so much more grain, such considerations were secondary. I felt I had essentially a limitless amount of film, so perhaps I could take more photographs and be less careful? Because being careful doesn’t always lead to good photographs. Over the past few years, I’d see something, stop walking, take a photograph, then walk on. Time to try something different. I took off the 50mm lens and put on the small compact skopar 35mm lens, actually the first lens I bought with my M6 in 2015, and (I knew) a favourite of Tim’s. I decided to take this film with me on a few of my 2023 trips. The risk was that the images be lost to waves of grain didn’t bother me. When I came back from a trip to North America, on the scans I saw the Niagra Falls through a curtain of static and mist. It was fine.

I went to Ireland and the green hills dissolved under a grainy torrent. Looking at the scans, I realised it didn’t look so bad.

Euclid launched in July, and I was in Paris almost all of July and August. There are quite a few stories to tell about the first images from Euclid and how not everything worked out exactly as we expected immediately. Everyone working on the project in those days was under enormous pressure to understand the satellite and what was happening out in space. But on the weekends I was happy to take my camera filled with rolls of Tim’s film and walk for miles around town in the baking heat, taking many pictures. Shutter set to 1/250, don’t stop, click. I got close enough. I saw some weird stuff.

I had my zones of predilection. In the Marais you could see all sorts of things if you walked around enough. It is hard taking pictures in Paris: everything here has been worn down, photographed millions of times.

Soon enough, it was winter again, and the gray days were back. Before I knew it, I had my last roll of film in the camera. I was walking across the street. There was some kind of weird glitch. 70 years slipped away. And then it was the last exposure in the roll.

By the end of the year, I had around 30 or so interesting photographs that maybe I wouldn’t have taken if Tim hadn’t sent me that film. They are here. Thanks, Tim!

A post for Tim

A post for Tim

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Tim Vanderweert, author of the Leicaphilia.com blog, left us last week. I couldn’t let Tim’s passing go without comment: like many people, I owe him a lot.

About a decade ago, just after the death of my father (I am sure these events were linked), I started taking photographs and photography more seriously. More intentionally, at least. Some mysterious path led me to film and Leica rangefinder cameras. The first time I held a Leica rangefinder was in a second-hand shop on the boulevard Beaumarchais, and that camera is still the camera I have with me almost every day. But what was going on? Like we do today I searched the internet to understand, and soon enough I came across Leicaphilia.

A revelation! Leicaphilia was easily the most lucid, funny and opinionated website about film, Leica cameras and photography on the internet. The mysterious site administrator was well aware of all the contradictions of using such cameras today. A relief: most photography web-sites take themselves much too seriously. Soon after (January 2016), I wrote an email to Leicaphilia and sent through an article that I though might fit into the Leicaphilia ethos. I was surprised and happy when I received an almost immediate response from the admin (whom I learned was called Tim V) telling me that he’d be happy to run my article in a few weeks.

When I learned later that year that Tim was coming to Paris, I invited him to visit our institute and to come for espresso in my office. In person, Tim turned out to be like you’d expect from reading Leicaphila: immensely knowledgable, opinionated and cultured. But also very generous and encouraging. I showed him around where I work, and we visited the old Observatory buildings. We even got into the normally-closed museum of astronomical instruments after I told the observatory staff that Tim was a visiting specialist of rare optical instruments (which is true!).

Tim photographing at the observatory

Tim met my colleagues and at the end we had espressos once again this time on the IAP terrace. It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon. When I told him about my film-developing technique, he arranged for a pack of Diafine developer to be hand-delivered to my office by relatives who were visiting Paris. They came for coffee too, and coincidentally it was a day that we had birthday cake in the office. A big party ! It was a revelation seeing what my rolls of Tri-X looked like in Diafine. In emails since then, Tim promised to keep my in Diafine indefinitely.

Coffee on the terrace at the IAP

Over the next years, I followed Leicaphilia closely. There was no place on the internet you could find such abstruse, challenging and funny content. Tim was trying to work out what all this stuff meant, where photography was going, or not, and it was great to follow along on his journey. Then there were the excellent take-downs of crooks and charlatans like that time he found the mugshots and police records of a couple of scammers who were selling ”black paint” Leica cameras. I was amazed he was able to write so much given that many of the articles seemed to be so deeply researched and knowledgable. Somewhere in there, Tim activated commenting on the site, and those comments were a revelation: it turned out that there was a community of civilised, intelligent people following the site who could have a meaningful conversation without descending into polemic and outrage; very uncommon on today’s internet.

A few times, Leicaphilia went dark or offline: Once Tim was (perhaps) hacked by Scientologist friends of Thorsten O. (frequently a subject of ridicule on Leicaphilia). But often the silences were simply Tim’s centres of interests changing. They made us all realise how much we valued Leicaphilia and how eagerly we awaited Tim’s next idiosyncratic update.

But then, around two years ago after a longer pause, Tim announced he had cancer. I was shocked. It sounded hopeless but after surgery and treatment he recovered and in summer 2021 we met once again in Paris. First at a cafe in the Marais, and then for a meal at our small Parisian apartment. Tim and his wife came as well as two exchange students that they had been hosting at their house. It was a lovely evening. Tim was in great form. He had brought copies of his books for me and we would have talked late into the night if the evening hadn’t been cut short by the results of a faulty COVID test.

Tim and Donna, Summer 2021

For most of the next 12 months, the only update on Leicaphilia was a brief message announcing that Tim was selling his digital Leica. I expected that Tim had been once again zooming around the back roads of North Carolina on his motorcycle. So I was unprepared for the message from Tim in August 2022 telling me that his cancer had returned and this time it didn’t look like there would be an easy escape. I remember around five years ago when I told him I was being treated for a ”minor” cancer (which is now thankfully under control). Tim mentioned that if something like that ever happened to him, he would be frightened. But talking to him after he sent me that message, he seemed more annoyed than frightened. Annoyed that this would happen to him now.

Readers of Leicaphilia know the rest of the story: Tim confounded the doctors by not dying then and there, but living for another four months. And during those four months Leicaphilia was a torrent of posts, often several every day. There was much new material, together with old posts that had been on the shelves. All of them in Tim’s trenchant funny style. He gave so much of the little energy he had left to us, the readers of Leicaphila. He was generous in other ways too: I travelled to the other side of Paris and picked up almost a hundred metres of film that Tim had sent to me via a friend who had been to Tim’s premature ”going-away-party’;.

Leicaphilia was inspirational. In person, Tim was an exceptional character. You don’t meet so many people like Tim in a lifetime. Returning to my apartment the evening after the day Tim died, I found a parcel waiting for me. It was a packet of Diafine that Tim had sent me only a few days before his death. Hail and farewell, Tim, and thanks!

Reading Don DeLlio’s “The Silence “

Reading Don DeLlio’s “The Silence “

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I’ve been reading DeLillo’s books for a long time now. The first time I heard his name was when I struck up a conversation with a man on a train in England at the end of the 1980s. He told me that I should really read DeLillo. But it was not until I was a summer student in New Mexico in 1991 that I came across White Nose and its ”airborne toxic event”. And then Underworld when it was published in 1997. I remember carrying around that heavy brick of a book with a photograph of the World Trade Center in the foggy background and St. Marks’ church in the foreground. There was a tiny bird high the photograph, superposed on the towers, that looks to us now like an airplane. DeLillo to me has always been a constant steady background presence. He has always been writing about how conspiracy and terror have such a large place in our contemporary consciousness. So when on one of my walks around town I saw his new book The Silence on the shelves at Shakespeare and Co. I immediately bought it. DeLillo finished this book just before our ”current situation” started.

It is a very slim volume, not more than 100 pages set in a mono-spaced font like it was bashed out on a typewriter. The events in the book take place over the space of a few hours. There’s a catastrophic event but the consequences are not an explosion or widespread destruction. Instead, almost every electronic device stops working. Screens turn dark. And here the event is not seen from the perspective of governments or nations but simply that of a few friends gathered around to watch a football game on TV; there’s a faint echo of the magnificent stadium scene at the start of Underworld. This time, however, people are at home.

DeLillo offers no clear explanations. Perhaps it’s a coronal mass ejection. They’re called ”Carrington Events” after the 19th century scientist who realised what was electrocuting telegraph operators around the world and lighting up the night sky was a big blob of charged particles coming in from the sun. Such an event would have had minimal impact 150 years ago, but today of course it would be catastrophic. Satellites observing the sun would give us a few minutes warning but there would be not much else we could do other than save the files and close the applications. But in DeLillo’s book there are hints that it’s not a natural event.

This is what the silence looks like now

You see, he is not really interested in explaining what happened. His question: what would we do if the screens went dark? What would happen to human consciousness when the current stops flowing? This being a DeLillo novel our friends speak in a complicated stream-of-consciousness diction comprising waves of technical language and terms. Sentences are pared down to a string of nouns. Almost all events take place in a single room; he’s not interested in outside. But what’s happening outside? “You don’t want to know,” a character informs us. One of our friends happens to be an Einstein scholar, a convenient person to have around in an an event like this in a DeLillo novel. And at one point, an uncanny prophecy:

“What comes next?” Tessa says. “It was always at the edges of our perception. Power out, technology slipping away, one aspect, then another. We’ve seen it happening repeatedly, this country and elsewhere […] But remaining fresh in every memory, virus, plague, the march through airport terminals, the face masks, the city streets emptied out. […] Are we an experiment that happens to be falling apart, a scheme set in motion by forces outside our reckoning? This is not the first time that these questions have been asked. Scientists have said things, written things, physicists, philosophers.”

Since Underworld DeLillo’s focus has narrowed right dow. There is no sweep of event, and the voices speaking are only echoing sounds that we have heard before. There’s no resolution, of course. We leave the book still waiting for the TVs to come back on again and for the smartphone screens to light up. And we start to imagine, just a little, what life without these devices might be like.