One day in ‘98 or maybe ‘99 me and my mum had the most amazing afternoon on the South Bank, ending in the Haywood Gallery where we saw Henri Cartier Bresson’s ‘Europeans’ upstairs and works by Francis Bacon’s down. It blew my mind…. the decisive moment indeed. He had a way of making you be inside the picture without the subjects knowing you were there, it’s like you can almost touch them.

“With a Leica camera you can do anything,”  said Henri Cartier Bresson who once compared the prestigious German camera to a ‘big passionate kiss”

“And yet…and yet…this is a camera that is stripped of all pretense and electronic hoopla. It is an all-manual camera. Rangefinder focusing, once the most common form of focusing in the days before single-lens-reflex cameras, can in many ways be more accurate than manual SLR focusing, especially in low light. The camera is unobtrusive (no loud motordrive or mirror housing). It is built like a tank, albeit a tank made by Mercedes-Benz, but a tank nonetheless ”

So many famous photos have been shot on a Leica and so many of the ‘greats’ have shot on them… Lee Friedlander, Sebastio Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark, nan Golding, Henri Cartier Bresson to name but a few. 

Today James D Kelly i think is making beautiful work and there is no doubt in my mind that he will go down in history…. the way he documents London life now is incredible. We met some years ago in a dark room.