There is something in its images that tastes of another time. An analogue flavour, a grain that recalls film, a depth that does not seem made of numbers but of memory. Its photographs have the tone of things seen long ago and never forgotten, that gentle patina which digital usually erases. It is as if every shot were born already with a past.
But the thing I love most is another: with Leica, the camera disappears. There is nothing between me and what I am looking at, no distraction, no automatism deciding in my place. Only the essential remains, the finger, the light, the waiting. It forces me into slowness, and slowness is exactly what I am looking for: the time to feel before shooting, to wait for the instant instead of chasing it.
I work with a prime lens, a single one, and I zoom with my legs. I love shooting wide open, leaving a single thin plane in focus, because photography, for me, is also choosing what to let fade. It is a way of saying where to look, of pointing to the place where the soul of the person in front of me lives, and of letting everything else dissolve into a caress.
It is not the camera that makes an image true. But there are tools that resemble you, that go along with your way of feeling instead of opposing it. Leica, for me, is this: not what I photograph with, but what I look through.
A single lens, and my steps
I do not use a zoom. It may seem a limitation, and instead it is my greatest freedom. When I want to get closer to someone, I do not turn a ring: I move, I take a step, I shorten the distance with my body and not with a mechanism. And in that step something happens, because truly approaching a person is never a neutral gesture. It is a silent request for trust, and a promise of respect.
The prime lens obliges me to this, and I am grateful to it. It forces me to enter the other person's space instead of stealing it from afar, to be there, to share the same air. It is a way of seeking intimacy with the feet before the eyes: no comfort, no shortcuts, only the right distance, earned by coming closer.
Of all lenses, it is with the 50 mm that I have the most feeling. It is the lens that sees the world more or less as the human eye does, emphasising nothing, distorting nothing: it tells things as they are, with the same measure with which we truly look at them. It makes me feel close without intruding, present without imposing. It is the distance of friendship, the one at which people talk looking each other in the eye... and that is exactly where I want to be when I photograph someone.
