She reached into her bag, took something out, leaned towards me and placed it in my outstretched hand. Seeing my amazement she asked if I would like to see one of her cameras. I was astonished: in our world families had (at most) only one camera and any photographs they took were in black and white. She explained that she had two – "one for colour and one for black-and-white". "What sort of camera do you have?" I asked. I had never heard this kind of talk before. What did she like about the country? "Oh," she said, "that's easy: the cloudscapes." She explained that she was a photographer and Ireland had very interesting light because of the way the sunlight was filtered through the clouds.Īt this point I sat up and began paying attention. It turned out that she was English and on her first visit to Ireland. We sat on a nearby bench and my father engaged her in conversation, much to my embarrassment. It was one of those metaphorical moments.’ The little boy was dejected because nobody would play football with him. John says: ‘The “austerity” regime imposed as a condition of the EU bailout was visible everywhere in Ireland at the time. She was in her 30s, neatly dressed and with a self-possessed air.Ī photograph taken by John Naughton on 20 April 2013 in a caravan park in Kerry. On one such Sunday we wound up in Killarney, Ireland's answer to the Lake District, and we were walking through the beautiful grounds of Muckross House when we came on a young woman sitting on a bench. On Sunday afternoons, my parents insisted that the family go for a "drive" – an idea I found tedious in the manner of teenagers the world over. I was brought up in rural Ireland, which in the 1950s was a pretty sober society, priest-ridden and poor – not unlike Poland before the Berlin Wall came down. I caught it via a chance encounter when I was 13. Parfit contracted the illness because a rich uncle gave him an expensive camera (make unspecified). But I recognise the longing for perfection. My condition is nothing like as bad as that. Then he had the colours repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted – which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head."
#Leica m240 professional#
When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the 20th century – cars, telegraph wires, signposts – and usually all people. "Of a thousand pictures," Macfarquhar writes, "he might keep three. When he came home, Parfit developed his photographs and sorted them. He would wait for hours, reading a book, for the right sort of light and the right sort of weather. (That's the kind of thing you can do when you're a fellow of All Souls.) Like me, he dislikes the harshness of the midday sun, so he'd wait for morning or evening light. Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum PhotosĪccordingly, between 19, Parfit spent about five weeks each year in Venice and St Petersburg. There were only 10 things in the world he wanted to photograph, writes Macfarquhar, "and they're all buildings: the best buildings in Venice – Palladio's two churches, the Doge's Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal – and the best buildings in St Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building". Unlike me, though, Parfit has specialised. Only the other day I was reading Larissa Macfarquhar's profile of Derek Parfit, the celebrated Oxford philosopher, who believes that most of the world looks better in reproduction than it does in life. If so, then I've had it for more than half a century. You can think about this obsessiveness, this quest for the one perfect picture, as a kind of illness. I like this last one particularly, because the lad in the photograph is about the same age as I was then and I often wonder if he's still around, and what he looks like now. Think, for example, of his famous picture of the guy leaping over a puddle or the one of the two stout couples enjoying a picnic on the banks of the Marne or his magical picture of a cheeky young boy carrying two bottles of red wine on the Rue Mouffetard in 1954. Like the images that Henri Cartier-Bresson captured, apparently effortlessly, in their thousands. In reality I'm merely an obsessive who takes lots of photographs in the hope that some day, just once, he will produce an image that is really, truly memorable. No, let me rephrase that: I would like to be a photographer.