BY BERT STEPHANI
Like in pretty much every country in the world, consuming is the national occupation of choice in Belgium. But on Sundays consumerism takes a break. There are exceptions but by law, stores have to close on Sunday. There’s a lot of pressure on the government to loosen or even completely change the rules. Multinationals have to feed their ever growing machines and consumers want to shop 24/7.
But honestly, it’s not so bad to be unable to buy more meaningless stuff once a week.
My oldest working digital camera is the X-Pro1 and my oldest lens for that camera is the 35mm F1.4, so that’s what I used for these pictures. The viewfinder is a bit low res and the controls are a little sluggish in 2019. But if I’m completely honest, I could probably still do 80% of my photo work with this “old” combination. The original X-Pro forces you to slow down and that’s necessarily not a bad thing. Shooting this story reminded me how enjoyable the slow simplicity can be. My X-Pro1 was pretty much retired, but it’s still way too good to sit in the back of my cupboard.