At Pain Quotidien

They had been enjoying themselves and had not stopped talking. Now it was time for them to settle up and concentrate on the business in hand. A moment's silence and also they were still. Click.

Two elbows, one bottle

In order for a digital camera to see to focus in low light it has to be assisted by a spotlight built into the camera that shines without your asking when the subject is too dim for the automatic focus too cope. This is very irritating and can ruin the shot. Here the subjects were so absorbed in each other that if you had shone a search light at them they would not have noticed.

The photograph was taken at Marlow and Sons in Williamsburg, a place where they understand the romance of candlelight (the whole room is more or less lit by candlelight), the right music, making people feel welcome, and service.

Surprise

You seldom know what people are talking about or feeling when you are observing them. Before I took this picture, I had been watching the couple and I thought from their expressions that they didn't know each other well. They were being polite and careful. After this show of aggressive surprise, I am not sure.

Smoking lovers

In this photograph, taken in London in the buffet of Waterloo station, thirty years before I took the couple at Diner (above), there is more expectancy than surprise in the young lady's expression, and not a scrap of aggression. In fact, even without their shared love of tobacco, they seem made for each other. You could not be sure of that in "Surprise". Those were still the days when it was polite to light your girlfriend's cigarette for her and always before your own. And there is more in her look than the sweet anticipation of that first delicious drag on her cigarette.

A choice too great

The menu has more than a hundred items on it. The tender touch from the left hand of a friend is calming. Going out means you do not have to shop, cook or wash up. But... you have to decide where to go, drive there, park and choose from a menu that is too large. It can be a strain, worse than eating in. An old school buddy of Caroline's, Scott Kelly, once told me that the best meal he'd ever eaten at a restaurant was at a provincial airport in France. The menu consisted of one hors d'oeuvres, one main course and one desert. The relief was so great that he sank into his chair, downed the house wine and left a happy man.

Café Maya

Café Maya, which lay in a rundown plaza on the edge of Cold Spring, New York was an old diner with eight stools, eight tables, and a television set tuned to soccer from Europe. There was a small staff of devoted workers. Apart from the good cheap food, the reason you went there was Louis, the owner. He was irresistibly charming and his place became the place that made eating out a guaranteed pleasure. You brought your own bottle, but the lemonade always had a kick to it. Then it closed, just like that. We heard rumours, and they proved to be right. He opened a large place 5 miles up the road. A road house for commercial travelers, IBM on-their-way-uppers, and sundry dusty housewives and adulterers. We starved, and he made a fortune.

Escape from Techno

After our main course at Diner in Williamsburg I asked the waitress if we could have our desert at a table outside. She said that that would be fine. The food had been as good as anywhere in the city and the service probably better than anywhere in the city.

It was not the heat of the inside that made us want to move; the temperature was about right for a power saving minded proprietor. The trouble was the music — the Techno music. Not broadcast at the modest level of the thermostat but at a level that required one person wanting to tell their friend something important and confidential either to go outside into the street or text him or her on their phone.

Anyway, outside was heaven as our friend above also thought. The dessert was A1 and the bill most reasonable.

Woman at a party

I cannot remember the occasion that I took this picture. It was almost certainly a wedding or a dance somewhere in England in the 1970s where glasses were constantly refilled, and that this woman had an unusually un-English face. I also wonder if curly hair was the fashion then or her own statement.

I remember that it was taken on Ilford 800 ISO HPS film with a Leica. 800 ISO was comparatively high speed for those days and HPS had excellent grain structure and shadow detail.

Bar Tano

Tano Bar Saturday brunch. One superb waiter not able to cope with the unexpected crowd calls proprietress for help but first she must feed her children and children's friends. Within two minutes she had her sleeves rolled up, apron on, clearing tables and taking orders. Lovely place and v. tasty sandwiches.

Carroll Gardens barbecue

I handed the camera to Caroline because I was sitting to her right and did not have such a good view of the tired girl against the pillar as she had. I whispered, "Put the camera to your eye and press the shutter, just press it gently, don't jerk it."

Solemn moment

More that Nikon shutters are as smooth as silk than my hand rock steady, but I believe that this photograph was taken at 1/5th of a second. Diner is a marvelous place where the waitress sits or crouches at your table and reels off the menu from memory and writes it at the same time on the paper tablecloth. Wine, (Julianénas out of a ten litre box, yes box, decanted into litre bottles) pasta and chocolate cake, out of this world. And a couple, heads together, her hand holding his ear. Why? Maybe just trying to concentrate on who owes what for the dinner.

Envious moment

I dug this out of the files: the bar at the Bolshoi, Moscow, 1980. The place much more brightly lit than Diner so no camera shake troubles, this time with a Leica. In this picture I want to know what the passing man is thinking as he watches the couple about to gobble up their glasses of champagne. Or is it the girl he's looking at?

Botanica, early evening

I was watching the tangled limbs and slumped bodies in the foreground. I did not notice the waitress in the middle distance until I downloaded the picture. Here was the "happy accident". We see the poise and balance needed to be quick but un-rushed, never spilling a cocktail filled to the brim, never banging a plate down on the table or bumping into somebody's chair. Always having time to answer a customer but knowing that another customer is waiting for their food or drink. Knowing on a busy night you can't dally. At the same time, you must be unfailingly pleasant and polite. And to complete the "happy accident", I had, by mistake, set the camera to automatically focus in the middle of the frame, thereby having the waitress in focus.

Anxious moment

I began making life going on photographs in London in the early 1960s. Forty five years later I roamed the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York and found the Botanica, where Caroline and I have had, over the last three months, the best time drinking coffee and Pisco Sours. Late one afternoon, when Caroline had gone to Fairways, I moved seats to be nearer to this couple who looked promising. She laid her hand on his clasped hands but he made no move to touch back. Perhaps that is why her expression is a look of such uncertainty. The woman in the background, seems just to want to talk.