Canon AE-1 Program

TEST DATA. The cabinet was in the hallway, which everybody found strange. Most people keep a collection somewhere out of the way, in a spare room or a cellar, and mine was the first thing you saw when you came through the door. That was deliberate. I wanted to walk past it.

The first one was a Zeiss my father gave me in 1974, the year my eldest was born. He said a photograph is the only thing you can make that is worth more in thirty years than it was on the day, and he was right about that, although he was wrong about almost everything else. I still have the light meter that came with it. That one is not for sale.

I bought the second because the first jammed, and the third because the second was too heavy to carry with a child on my hip. After that there was no reason any more. There was a market on Saturdays where a man sold cameras out of a suitcase, and I went every week for eleven years. He knew what I had and he would keep things back for me. When he died his daughter sent me a box with four of them in it and a note that said he had put them aside.

People ask whether I used them. All of them. Every single one has been through a roll. There are cameras in that cabinet that have photographed three of my children and two of my grandchildren, and a few that only ever went to Zeeland and back, and one that I took to Rome and dropped on the steps at Santa Maria in Trastevere. That one still works. You can see the dent.

What I was never interested in was the boxes. I know that is what makes them worth something, and I know I have cost myself money over fifty years by throwing them away, but a camera in a box is a paperweight. I bought them to use and I used them, and the marks on them are mine.

The hardest part was not deciding to sell. It was deciding not to leave them to the children. They do not want them, and they were too polite to say so for about ten years, and in the end my daughter said it plainly, which I am grateful for. A collection that nobody wants becomes a burden the day after you die.

So I would rather hand them over now and know. That is the whole reason I said yes to this instead of the auction house, who wanted them in lots of eight with no names on anything. I want the person who buys the Rolleiflex to know it went to Rome.