Leica Lockdown by Roderick Field

A grubby boy looks up at his Dad. ‘That’s it, wind it on, line up those overlapping squares,’ says the man, his giant leathery hands demonstrating the actions. ‘That’s focussing, so your pictures don’t come out blurry. Now, press the button, GENTLY,’ he encourages. ‘And always have the strap round your neck so you can’t drop the camera,’ The Minolta. ‘A year’s wages for some people,’ says the Dad with a wink. (Make sure the strap is round your neck.)

The projector whirrs to our smiles or concentration. There’s Mum on skates. Or my brothers, lit by Hitchcock one sunny, stormy-skied day. There’s Jackie, my teenager sister, thin as celery with white legs of string. And of course, there’s me, the baby, suckling at a milky bottle in my gigantic perambulator as Ian carefully chews a dandelion stem.

Time is stopped. We all live forever. Smile.

As a tall, thin teenager, I was never a good fit with those around me. ‘Too clever for the council estate, too council estate for it to matter,’ said my headmaster discouragingly. I took a camera as companion, I liked the way it stopped time, how it found oblongs of order in the chaos of living. Together we made notes to debate and relate as we fell in love or watched children be born while houses and places came and went. ‘Photography is a tenacious mistress,’ Terence Pepper (of The National Portrait Gallery) told me some years ago.

When Merchant & Mills started in 2010, the camera still hung around my neck like a talisman, like a passport. I could be anywhere, looking and editing what life showed me. We put photography to work to get ourselves noticed.

Just before the Coronavirus hit the headlines, I overheard myself saying, ‘I don’t really photograph for myself these days. . . .

I suddenly bought a Leica M, a rangefinder camera that sticks tightly to its own, manual heritage whislst packing in really useful modern, digital features in a similar ethos to Merchant & Mills. In that moment, I was enticed and enchanted by the Leica legacy of mindful, spontaneous, intrinsically human photography – much of the memorable 20th Century reportage was taken with these simple, functional, hand built cameras. It arrived quickly and I cradled its dense, machined weight in my grown-up hands, bringing it to my eye and watching those familiar rectangles collide and divide through the bright-lined viewfinder. Legendary pictures made by a litany of talented loners added to the gravitas of the instrument.

When the lockdown came, I cackled inside. I was born to isolate! The offspring, and the company, suddenly stopped making any demands on me. At first the days and nights lost their shape. I watched the sunrise from the wrong end of the day. I stopped shaving, slept in my clothes, feral and lawless with no-one to tell me what to do as nobody knew, not the elders nor the government. I felt ten again.

STAY AT HOME, we were told. A new routine emerged. ‘Mrs Mills’ would go to work each day, keeping the business running  by herself. I was left with Flower, a 4-year-old Patterdale Terrier. We eyed one another warily.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said. She wagged her stump of a tail, I put the camera strap around my neck, and we began.