Old Town
Canon AE-1 · Tri-X · 2022
Most visits to the streets started in the blue hour and ended when the last bus came.
I printed a small set of these for a community hall evening in Basel. The Canon AE-1 jammed back in 2017, so part of the series was made with one lens borrowed from the woman who runs the hardware shop.
A few of the best frames came from a single afternoon near the marina, during a passing shower. Most frames were shot on the Canon AE-1 with Tri-X, scanned the same week. There is a quietness to the bus stops on wet Mondays that I tried hard to keep. These photographs were made over several visits with the Canon AE-1, starting on a borrowed day off one autumn.
Notes
Many of these frames were made within walking distance of the moor, on long walks. I kept coming back to the same few hillsides over the last few weekends until people started to recognise me. Work on Old Town began with a single roll and grew over most of May. Funnily enough, the light around the city park changes quickly, and many of the best frames were taken in the last few minutes before dark.
The series is still open; I add a few pictures most mornings before work, usually after a walk along the old railway line. Several of these were taken from the same spot near the market square before and after a storm. The order of the pictures follows the river downstream rather than the contact sheets. On a few visits I came back from the piers with nothing, except a good walk.
I printed contact sheets in the spare room and chose the frames with a neighbour. Most of Old Town was edited on the balcony, with the contact sheets spread out on the floor. I shot this mostly with a standard 50mm lens on the Canon AE-1, which made me choose more carefully. Each picture in Old Town is shown in its original colours, exactly as framed.