A frozen moment in the capital of fashion (Pic: Stephen Dowling)
Certain cities bring out the street photographer in you.
Istanbul is one of my favourites, a roll's worth of photo opps around every crowded corner. New York used to be two decades ago, frantically following in the footsteps of the famed and fearless photographers who captured human moments amid the concrete and skyscrapers.
Paris? You don't even have to ask the question.
What we know as street photography was incubated and then turbocharged by a generation of street photographers nearly a century ago, many of them exiled from other European countries, seeing the city through the eyes of portable cameras: Brassai, André Kertész , Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Every June I spent a few hours going to and from the Bievres International Photo Fair, an event which includes Europe's biggest used camera market. It usually gives me a few spare hours to exercise my inner Cartier-Bresson, though I'm usually hauling a couple of bags on my back and somewhat less likely to fade into the background…
I shot this in 2024 on the Monday after the Bievres fair, on a prototype camera that has only just been released: the Chroma Click. The Click is the brainchild of Steve Lloyd who runs Chroma Camera, the one-man camera brand based in Liverpool in the UK. Chroma Camera concentrates on 3D-printed medium-format and large-format bodies, but the Click is their first 35mm camera, built around the Double Glass two-element 24mm lens Chroma Camera has been selling since 2023. I shot a bunch of rolls on this camera as Lloyd tweaked and refined the design. The Click can shoot both full-frame and half frame; this roll was shot half-frame.
I had already shot a couple of rolls of Fresh Kodak Gold 200 on the Click, but this time I loaded some expired Agfa Vista 200 film in the Click to take advantage of a sizzlingly sunny summer's day; this film was discontinued in 2005 and expired rolls can take on a pleasing red shift as they age.
Like many Western cities, Paris has been colonised by Lime bikes, the electric bikes that can be booked from your phone for short trips and left where you no longer need them. You often see them heaped in untidy piles on popular thoroughfares.
Heaps of bright green Lime bikes are by now the kind of visual clutter that most of us no longer notice as we plod our way through the cities we live in. I'm the same, even if I have a worrying number of bike pictures on my Flickr. And there he was: a casually stylish figure stood behind an ungainly pile of bikes, a jacket beside him in a boutique window. A quick compose – the Click doesn't have any focusing or exposure controls, just a magnetic-shutter lever – and I snapped the shot.
Part of this pic's charm, I think, is that expired-film palette. It might have looked just as nice shot on Kodak Gold or ColorPlus; a better-than-brand-new camera and a film that hasn't been made for 20 years, freezing a summer's day moment on a Paris street corner.
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