This reminds me of the rainy streetscapes of
Caillebotte .
Today was a milestone in my six months as a skyway flaneur. I dusted off my old
Nikon S2 rangefinder camera and took it for a spin in the rainy greys of the early day. It seemed appropriate to use black and white film in the camera. The S2 is a completely mechanical camera, without a single electron used to control or image anything. I had the film developed at Target on the Nicollet Mall, and when I got home I scanned it at 4800 dpi resolution on my Epson V600. The original of the image above is 7200 by 4800 pixels, or 34 megapixels. My Nikon D90 creates 12 megapixel images, by comparison.
(If you are new to this blog, bear with me as I reminisce, or skip this entry and enjoy the briefer bites of city life below.
The story of the Nikon S2
I bought the camera in 1968 from a used camera dealer in Cincinnati. For the next year I travelled extensively around the U.S. and shot about 200 rolls of tri-x black and white film. It cost me about 18 cents a roll for film and development since I had my own darkroom. My heroes in photography were Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, and other street photographers who created the genre. The S2 is small, fast, and reliable, in addition to having terrific optics.
For the next 40 years the S2 moved around with me from place to place, and got little or no use. In 1972 I loaned it to an artist for a year. He moved to Albequerque, and I thought I would never see it again. But he returned it, still intact, and for the next 38 years it has simply been a souvenir of a fantastic time in my life, when I divided my days and heart between being a hippie and being an up and coming corporate communications type.
Street photography has always been at the intersection of those two roles for me. Now that my communications career is winding down toward retirement, the hippie is reasserting himself. And today the hippie took out the old Nikon and saw the world through its brilliant viewfinder window again, fresh as a 20 year old on the road. Oh if I had known then what I knew now...
I would have done the same thing all over again.
In fact, I am doing the same thing all over again, wandering through the city, lost in thought and entranced by the rich urban enviornment, an environment that seems both more detailed, more fraught, more poetic with consequence through the camera's window.
