I bought a Leica so I would have a reason to see people

I bought an expensive camera. I told myself, the way everyone tells themselves, that it was for the photographs. Better glass, better files, a thing that would make me take pictures worth keeping.

And I do take better pictures with it. That part turned out to be true. But going back through what I have shot since, the ones I actually care about are almost all of people, and photographing people requires being near people, which is not something I do very often.

So the camera did work. Just not the way I bought it to.

There is a version of this where I sound charming about it. The truth is more boring and slightly sadder. I am a person who will happily go six weeks without arranging to see anyone, not out of any dislike of company, just because the arranging never makes it to the top of the list. Owning something that only pays off in the presence of other people turned out to be a much better intervention than deciding to be more sociable. The camera does not care about my intentions. It just sits there being useless at home.

I grew up in a house with no photographs in it. I have thought about that a lot since. My parents had a basic film camera that came out for holidays and birthdays, and the results lived semi organised in a drawer in the living room. Nothing on the walls. The only pictures displayed anywhere were two small headshots of my parents in uniform, in a room that nobody really used.

After I left for college, they put a portrait of me up in that same room. Ten times bigger than the headshots. I still do not entirely know what to do with that.

I am not going to draw a straight line from that room to the camera. It would be too neat and probably wrong. But I do notice that the thing I want from photography is not the image. It is the evidence that I was somewhere, with someone, and that it was worth marking.

Which is a strange thing to need an expensive object to arrange.

Anyway. The practical takeaway, if you want one: buy the thing that only works when you are around other people. Not the thing that works best alone. I own plenty of those already and they have never once made me leave the house.

There will be photographs here eventually. That is rather the point.