Blue Bench
11 February 2007 · Herne Bay Pier, Kent
Herne Bay Pier has a history of considerable ambition and repeated misfortune. The third pier, opened at Easter 1899 and designed by Head, Wrighton & Company of Thornaby-on-Tees, was at 3,787 feet — just over seven tenths of a mile — one of the longest pleasure piers in England. It carried a tramcar from 1924, survived the Second World War with structural damage repaired using Bailey bridges, and drew pleasure steamers to its landing stage until 1968, when the far end was closed. The Grand Pier Pavilion at its landward end burned down in June 1970; its replacement, opened by Edward Heath in 1976 and known locally as The Cowshed, fared better. The pier itself did not: a storm in January 1978 destroyed the middle section, the remains were demolished in 1980, and what had been a seven-tenths-of-a-mile structure was reduced to the stub at the shore end and an isolated pier head still standing out at sea, too substantial to demolish and now marked by a solar-powered navigation light.
The blue panels that ran down the centre of the pier stub were part of an interim arrangement on the remaining stub. They would not last: regeneration of the pier began in 2008, when Canterbury City Council established the Herne Bay Pier Trust as a registered charity, and the subsequent redevelopment changed the character of the pier's appearance. But in 2007, the blue panels were there, and on this February afternoon with the sun tracking low across the western sky, they were casting the specific quality of light visible in this image: sunlight streaming in from the west under the panels, reaching the east-facing decking and the bench against the blue wall, warming the aged timber boards while leaving the painted metalwork in the same register as the panels behind it.
The bench and the panels occupy almost the entire frame and are almost exactly the same colour. The bench, painted the same blue as the panel, nearly disappears against it — its seat and back rail visible only by the fine shadow lines they cast on the surface behind them, and the four legs visible only where they meet the decking. The image works because of the opposition between two planes: the large flat blue of the upper two-thirds, where bench and panel merge, and the warm horizontal amber of the pier decking in the lower third, where the low sun has lit the weathered planks from the side and the bench legs cast long thin shadows across the boards. The join between the two — where the bench legs meet the floor, where blue gives way to wood — is the point the eye keeps returning to.
The film is Agfa Vista 400, a budget consumer emulsion that handled blues with particular richness and gave warm tones — the ambers and ochres of lit timber — a saturation that more neutral films would have rendered more coolly. Vista 400 was discontinued in 2018, another casualty of the contraction of the film market, and has acquired something of a retrospective following among those who used it before its disappearance. Its handling of saturated primaries in direct light, as in this image, was one of its consistent strengths.
Leica M6 · Summicron 50mm f/2 · exposure unrecorded · Agfa Vista 400
The Leica M6 is a 35mm rangefinder film camera manufactured between 1984 and 1998 — the model that first brought through-the-lens light metering to the M series while retaining the rangefinder mechanism and optical viewfinder that define the system. A rangefinder camera focuses not via the lens itself but via a separate coupled mechanism: two images visible in the viewfinder are aligned by rotating the focus ring, and when they coincide the lens is in focus. The viewfinder shows the scene through a window, not through the lens, meaning there is no blackout at the moment of exposure and the photographer can see what is happening around the frame as the shutter fires. The M6 body is all-metal, compact relative to an SLR of equivalent specification, and largely mechanical: without a battery it loses only the light meter. The Summicron 50mm f/2 is one of the defining lenses of the M system, in production in various forms since 1953 and considered by many users to represent the optimum combination of optical quality, size and maximum aperture for general use.
