West Hollywood, May 15, 2018
I was walking down busy La Cienega Boulevard with my camera. One of those aimless strolls we photographers like to call a “photo walk”. It was a pleasant evening, the kind where the air smells faintly of ambition and exhaust fumes. Traffic was still dense. I wasn’t really looking for anything to photograph. Maybe I was searching for a “decisive moment”? Because in this city, you take what it gives you and pretend it was your idea all along.
Then I saw it. A Johnny Rockets diner. Its window, usually layered with flyers, decals, and misplaced optimism, was strangely bare. Inside, dim lighting cast a warm glow over chrome counters and red vinyl booths. Patrons looked like extras from a 1950s film that never made it past the audition.
But I didn’t want to document the scene. I wanted to make the photo feel like a nostalgic memory instead, the idea of a romantic diner, really.
Enter the Leica M240 and the Thambar 90mm: the lens that behaves more like a daydream than an optical instrument. Originally designed in 1935, it’s famous for rendering the world as though looking glass of the past. Perfectly blurry.
So I raised the camera and took a few shots. What I got wasn’t really a photo of a diner. It was more like a memory, softened by time, shaped by sentiment, appearing not quite of this world.
And for a moment, the diner became a quiet island in the middle of a noisy street.
