My Favorite Photo of 2025?

As I write these words it is mid-September, with almost a third of 2025 yet to go, yet I’m nonetheless fairly certain that the image above will turn out to be my favorite of the year. I wasn’t expecting this when I took the photo or when I processed and scanned the film. I’d gone out for a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge mainly for the pleasure of stretching my legs on a pretty evening but also to test out a “new”—in fact, a rather ancient—lens, a 1935 Leitz Hektor f6.3 I’d recently acquired. Impressed with the moody skies, I loaded my Leica III with color film (Kodak UltraMax 400).

Here’s the original scan:

Although I remembered taking the picture of these girls and having some hopes for it, something about the scan didn’t sit well with me. The idea of making it monochrome only came to me in the darkroom, later, where I’d recently had some success printing black and white photos from color negatives. Boosting the exposure (by opening up the aperture or increasing the time the enlarger projects the image onto the paper) and using filters to increase contrast can with certain C41 negatives yield superb black and white prints. After undertaking these procedures and moving the paper through the chemistry under the red safety lights, I switched on the overheads:

The monochrome palette of the Ilford multigrade RC paper for me transformed the image. Suddenly my eyes were drawn, as they had been when I fired the shutter, to the girls and to the trio of women behind them, the whole family grouping framed by the jostling crowd and the familiar stones and cables of my city’s most iconic bridge. The image now seemed to cohere, and in its somber, unassuming way perhaps to say something about the difficult year.

(Please excuse the odd swirl in the lower portion of my iPhone photo of the finished print, the last image in this post. It’s a reflection caused by the chemicals in the fixer tray).

Thanks for having a look.

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