Final analysis

Tim Clinch considers... ‘A man walking past the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly. circa 1953’ by Ernst Haas

Iam, I will admit, a lucky man. I have been a professional photographer all my working life, but when I am not working, I have a hobby about which I am passionate, and that hobby is photography.

However, passionate as I am about photography, and a great and enthusiastic student of photographic history, there are distinct gaps in my knowledge. Chasms down which slip some wonderful photographers and their work. For some reason they don’t feature in my thoughts and are often, in most cases quite wrongly, overlooked.

One of them is, for no explicable reason, Ernst Haas, and having chosen this picture and done some more research on him I feel extremely embarrassed that I’d let him slip away, especially as, for a while it meant so much to me. Mea culpa.

Haas was a visionary and a quite wonderful photographer, his book The Creation being one of the most successful photography books ever… but his career covered so many facets that it’s di cult to keep up. Alongside his influential books, he was a regular contributor to Vogue, Life magazine and many others. He was also president of Magnum (when Magnum was innovative and meant something and before it had become, in my opinion, the glorified postcard shop it is today). He was a pioneer of colour photography and regularly used motion blur in his work (which was unheard of and considered unusable by the technicians at Life magazine) and shot famous advertising campaigns for, amongst others, Volkswagen and Marlboro cigarettes.

So why this picture? If truth be told, I never realised it was by him. It is far from being one of his most famous images but I remember it vividly from my youth and to me it showcases real skill. The skill of someone at the top of their game with the confidence to shoot something so simple, to a certain extent so obvious and to carry it o perfectly.

I must have been 11 or 12 when I first saw it. Probably in one of my father’s books entitled The World’s Best Photographs 1955 or something along those lines (he was a keen photographer and collector of books). I had never been to the capital but was desperate to and for a while, for me, this picture was London. Not the cliché of a red bus, the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace. Not Changing the Guard or red phone boxes, no. I’d seen all those. This solitary gentleman, walking down Piccadilly past the Ritz and silhouetted against the fog, homburg at a jaunty angle and an umbrella ready for the rain summed up the mystery of the big city. The very word ‘Piccadilly’ giving me a thrill of anticipation. The anticipation of actually walking the streets of London.

It is, along with Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ one of the first pictures that awakened my love for photography. So evocative of time and place. So far removed from all the ‘faux vintage’ photography so commonplace today. So simple and yet so, so e ective.

‘ The skill of someone at the top of their game with the con dence to shoot something so simple’