This is a transcription of a historical interview discovered among a bottle of red wine, a mouldy blue cheese and the legless skeleton of a frog during the restoration of the House of the French Crown. Uncolourised.

Originally, I intended to build this article as a survey of pictorialism; once and for all to attempt to locate its birth, to split apart the already disheveled history of photography and then glue it back together more neatly. But it was starting to resemble an Excel spreadsheet and a dry historiographical dissertation far too much. So I'll take...

And there's also rakija. Overtaking in blind corners. Blood feuds. Ancient towns. Hospitality. Untamed spirit. A lot of lamb and mutton, fig jam. By now you can probably tell there's a lot lurking here. Time isn't infinite, and since we prefer getting to know at least part of something properly rather than skimming everything superficially, we...

So one day over at Bausch & Lomb, they sat down and decided it was about time to give TTH's portrait triplets a good kick in the nuts. Those lenses had been successfully annoying the competition since 1898.

In the previous article, I pondered and mused, among other things, about how only a few of my portrait lenses can currently challenge the Hermagis Portrait and the Fast Worker in the ring without immediately throwing in the towel. On paper, the Dallmeyer 3B 290mm f3.9 seemed like an evenly matched opponent—so how did it turn out? Did...