It Doesn't Have to Be One or the Other

One day in Nice, and excuses about the day job and the camera.

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^{All images shot with Leica SL3 or Q3.}

The most useful thing anyone handed out at Cannes Lions this year were fans. Motorized beauties that blow misty water. Stunning decision making.

It was 43°C (almost 110°F) two days running and mid-to-late thirties for most of the rest, with humidity off the charts. I don’t think I was properly dry for a week. The festival itself was good: good meetings, good panels, good conversations. But air conditioning was the scarcest resource in the south of France, and effective fans were a premium.

I had one day to recover before a weekend in Dublin. I thought about spending Monte Carlo. I’m an F1 fan, but with no race on it was just choosing one posh, expensive town over another, and I’d already had a year of yachts and expensive price tags living in Miami. My flight home was out of Nice. So I gave the day to Nice, and to looking for something with a bit of culture in it.

Vieux Nice (Old Town) delivered. Narrow streets in every shade of yellow and orange. Cafés spilling onto the pavement. Washing strung between buildings. Markets you have to walk through sideways. With shade. Which after a week of B2B conversations in that heat was the actual point.

I walked the old town and then out to the beach, which I did not know until I got there is stony. Think Brighton Beach (UK), plus twenty degrees, plus a great many more people. Which got me thinking about beaches. Live in California or Florida and the good weather is reliable enough that the beach becomes the fabric of daily life, somewhere between the gym and the supermarket. Grow up in Ireland and England and it is the opposite. A hot sunny day is an event, and when it turns up, everyone flocks. Nice was also the flocking kind. Stony, packed, parasol after parasol in lines, the water green and blue and yellow and clear at the edges, people in and out of it all afternoon. In terms of crowds Coney Island gets like that. Not much else I have seen in the States does.

Then I flew to Dublin, which was reliably wet, and that was exactly what I needed too.

Here is the part I did and didn’t plan for.

I recently went back into an industry I had left and told myself I would never return to. Full-time, proper hours. My real worry about going back was that I would put the camera down. I had a story ready for that. Work would open up travel, and travel would mean shooting. Then I travelled a lot in the first five weeks and shot almost none of it.

On the morning I went to Nice, knackered from the week, I nearly stayed in a café to read and answer email instead. I am very glad I didn’t. Somewhere in the old town I got the thing street photographers talk about. You stop hunting for photographs and just lock in. Into seeing, and you start wondering why you would ever spend a day any other way.

We have just moved back to New York and we are subletting, so nothing feels settled, and I have noticed how the habits are creeping in. “Once we’re settled, I’ll shoot more.” There is nothing actually stopping me except the story I keep telling myself. Vieux Nice made that plain. The job and the camera do not have to be one or the other.

One more thing, while I’m here. I haven’t published anything on this Substack in six months. After Art Basel in December I was socially wrung out, so I parked the writing and just took photographs for a few months. This is me starting again.

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