Leica M11 Safari
The day before
My Leica M11 Safari is in Germany.
It is lying on a table somewhere outside Wetzlar, being fussed over by people who know what they are doing.
But a camera in Germany helps nobody.
So I borrowed another one.
An M11 Monochrom this time.
No colour at all, not even the possibility of it.
The sensor sees only light and dark, and the first thing you notice is that you start doing the same.
You stop looking for a red jacket.
You start looking for where the light falls.
Leica Camera News
Mari Amman is an American-Italian contemporary artist working across photography, installation, video, poetry, painting, sculpture, textiles and design.
She describes her own practice as research-based, and uses terms such as Geological Empathy and Sublime Rheology to explore the relationship between people, nature, technology and the built environment.
Young, Inspiring and International: LOBA Emerging Talent
The German photographer Serghei Duve won the 2025 Newcomer Award with his series “Bright Memory”.
In the project he explores his family’s connection to Transnistria.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/2.8 · 1/750s · ISO 125 · 50mm · 2026-08-19
Leica M11 Safari
The morning went on sliders
And it took a while, I should say.
For a long time I believed the perfect picture would come straight out of the camera, that editing was something you did if you had missed in the viewfinder.
That is not how it works.
A raw file is a negative, no more and no less.
What I do at the screen is the same thing I did in the darkroom for thirty years — hold back, give a little more, choose the paper.
The trays are just called Shadows and Blacks now.
Leica M11 Safari
Coffee first
Global Living, as usual.
Coffee before camera, that is an order of things that works.
And there they sat.
The lads from the moped club at one table, one of them in a vest, the sun behind him like a white sheet.
He turned round and looked straight into the lens, and he neither apologised nor smiled.
At another table a man in a white t-shirt was laughing at something I could not hear.
A woman sat with her arms folded and let the world go by.
A man in a denim shirt was explaining something important with his hands, and his friend listened without interrupting.
That is why I go out with the camera.
Not for the buildings.
For people who are simply there, in the middle of their own day, with no idea that somebody thinks they are worth a picture.
Leica M11 Safari
Then I walked and looked
There is a sculpture in town with a hole straight through it.
I have walked past it a hundred times.
Today I stood on the other side and photographed through the hole, and the street suddenly became a small round world where two lads walked by with earphones in.
A little further on, a woman stood looking at her phone.
I saw her from behind, the hair clip, the earring, the crumpled jacket, and a hand that has held on to a great deal over the years.
On the screen there was a photograph of somebody.
Who it was I will never know, and perhaps that is how it should be.
Another woman was reading a sheet of paper, leaning against a stone balustrade.
Real paper, in her hand, in the middle of all the phones.
I do not know why I raised the camera there.
She was simply standing so well.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/5.6 · 1/750s · ISO 125 · 50mm · 2026-08-20
Two gulls and a street
Two gulls and a street
Down by the water two gulls sat on the quayside, one at each end, at that distance birds keep when they have decided to put up with one another.
The water lay dark behind them.
The white feathers shone.
And then, on the way to the car, with the camera already hanging in my hand and the day more or less over, Skolgatan opened up in front of me.
Cobblestones, timber-clad houses, a shadow cutting diagonally across the street.
What I take with me
What I take with me
The borrowed camera goes back eventually, and my own one comes home from Germany.
But I have learned something from walking around with a sensor that refuses to see colour.
Light and dark go further than you think.
And so do people.
The camera stays in my hand until I am sitting in the car.
That is today’s lesson, and I intend to hold on to it.
Pictures from today’s adventure
