May 6th 2024 – Montblanc.

With apologies to one of my heroes, Felix Tournachon (Nadar), who wrote the original book in 1899. I learnt a lot from his autobiographical and amusing story.

I have used this as the title for an exhibition of my own photographic work  which I called “Quand J’étais Photographe – The First 50 Years, 1974 to 2024.

Each year, at the beginning of June, in Biévres just south of Paris, there is a big photographic market and festival. They have an artists section where about 100 photographers can exhibit and sell their own work. In 2024 I decided to show my work there to “test the water” to see if my work and my style is still interesting and commercial.

My involvement in photography started when I was ten, I took our folding Kodak camera to photograph the church at Harrow on the Hill, I remember the results were puzzling, what I saw was not what the camera recorded.

My next lesson was the same year from a book by David Douglas Duncan, he lauded the praise of Nikkor lenses – this piqued my interest in both the technical side of photography, and Japan.

My first commercial exercise was in the movie industry using Polaroids for continuity work at Pinewood studios – a long story including buying a real Vulcan bomber from the James Bond “Thunderball” movie set.

Eventually  I went to college to study photography and got a piece of paper saying I knew what I was doing and I set up shop in 1974.

I got assignments to photograph drilling rigs and water and oil drilling equipment as well as fairgrounds in Sudan and some commissions to test cameras and camera equipment from manufacturers – this took me to Egypt, Sudan and the Gulf many times.

As I was living near Cambridge I also got work from the University and the Colleges taking portraits of Princes, Archbishops and other big-wigs at the honours ceremonies.

A fire in my premises in 1977 destroyed most of my work, but I still had a few negatives in my house so a little was left.

In 1994 I stopped, left everything and moved to France with a new young family and made a new life. We started an Internet company renting vacation properties and my photography was restricted to taking snaps of holiday homes and putting thousands of these properties online. We ended up with the biggest rental company online in France, but ill health put an end to  that.

In 2014 I returned to studying old photographic techniques. I had experimented with some of these in the 1970s, but work took my time and I had little left to experiment. But we now had a small rental business and my health seemed good which gave me some time to restart.

I had used digital and analogue electronic recording cameras since the 1980s and the rapid growth, since 1995 of digital technology seemed to replace chemical photography, but I have never found the way computer chips ‘interpret’ what is ‘seen’, to be useful – (I have the same problem with lens technology). So going back to the origins of using a camera to make a statement seemed a good plan.

After ten years of experiments and tests, Using my old negatives and transparencies and accumulating piles of old camera junk, lighting systems from the 1950s and filling dustbins with broken glass and scrap paper, I am now sorting through a small pile of photographs I have made to prepare for the Biévres exhibition.

I will select a few I think are worth showing – it is not an important show, but the audience will be only photographers and people passionate about photography, so the feedback will be useful.

I have made 42 orotones – 6 wet plate collodion ambrotypes – 28 silver/gelatine prints, to select a few from.

The prints re mostly from standard negative film stock, but some are from calotypes and wet plate collodion negatives. Camera sizes vary from 35mm to 30 x 40 cm.

Perhaps ten or twelve should be chosen to show, it is always tempting to present everything, but this seems wrong, nobody will be interested in a confusion of images I think.

Biévres is open on the first and second of June. I will not be there as I have to go to hospital for an operation on May 29th and will still be in recovery – but my son Jack will go for me.