Passive Inspiration
A print of this picture hung above the bath of my childhood home. My mother bought it in Paris during a romantic city break with my father before I was born, and hung it there as a reminder of that time.
I gazed up at the picture from the bath throughout my childhood. It was a quiet, unassuming presence that imbued me with an idea of what photography could be, beyond the smiling, the saying cheese, and the documentation of places visited, that make up a child’s understanding of photography.
My love for this photograph is therefore longstanding. Indeed, it and I have had a longer relationship than I have had with any other photograph. I’ve explored it more than any other over the years, and it has hung like a presence in my mind throughout.
Jeanloup Sieff
Jeanloup Sieff was a prominent fashion and portrait photographer and briefly a member of Magnum. He worked for the likes of Elle, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, and photographed the great and the good of both Paris and later New York. He worked almost entirely in black and white.
But this is not about him.
Woven
Café de Flore, Tôt le Matin is intertwined with the fabric of my life, it has been in my head as a measure, a goal, as a presence for all the time I can remember.
This was the photograph that led me to ask when colour was invented, as I couldn’t imagine living in a world without blue, (my favourite colour at the time).
It stood for everything I wanted to know about Paris, for me the city of lights was a view of a street from a cafe, not La Tour Eiffel seen from the Ecole Militaire.
During my time as a theatre geek I learned that Eugene Ionesco frequented the cafe. As I explored existentialism I learned that Sartre & Camus had hung out there (also Les Deux Magots, Cafe De Flore’s main rival).
The Sincerest Flattery
I have on numerous occasions tried to take my own ‘Café de Flore, Tôt le Matin’ or images inspired by it, and have, of course failed to make the image I wanted. I like to think that the instinct that drove Sieff to make his picture is the one that lives in me, and that one day I’ll make something that has as profound an effect upon someone else as this image has had on me.
I’ve read Sieff’s image in multiple ways over the years. As a snapshot, as a landscape, as a series of frames within frames. I’ve wondered whether Sieff knew the man crossing the road or whether Sieff was arriving or leaving when he took it. I assumed for a chunk of our combined history the photo was made in the Cafe’s intellectual heyday, and as such viewed it as time travel.
As my understanding of the passage of time changed, I came to realise that, having been taken in 1976, the image was made only five years before I was born. I now wonder if the chairs are empty because, by ’76 the Cafe was no longer bustling with the left-bank intellectuals that had filled the place before Sieff left for New York.
I wonder whether he was documenting their absence.
A few years ago I asked my mum what happened to the print from the old house. Neither of us had seen it in years. While no one would have thrown it out, it does appear to be lost to time.
For Christmas later that year, (after the cameras I received for my sixth and eighteenth christmases), I received a new print, smaller, and with a different crop, but containing everything I remember.
It hangs in my studio, quietly reminding me that I can do more.