52 Photographs (2018) #13: Crossing Luxembourg gardens, heading purposefully towards the sea
Week 13: my strength returns, and I walk as far as Luxembourg gardens. In three years of taking photographs with film cameras I have shot more than four hundred rolls; only a handful of those have been in colour. And I have never shot a single roll of colour film with a Leica camera in Paris. But on this day, for some unknowable reason, I loaded one of my three last rolls of Kodak colour film into my camera, and left the apartment.
Every time I put colour film in a camera I think of the scene in a certain Wim Wenders movie where everything suddenly turns into colour. Closing the camera, I imagine that change happening around me. For me, colour photography is hard. And because I don’t develop at home, I am even more parsimonious with the exposures. But when I saw this fellow crossing the gardens I didn’t hesitate.
I like his determined stride, and how the dark blue of his uniform stands out against the winter trees. Next week, we will be in black and white again.
