In September 2024, I was passing through the Jubilee Market in Covent Garden when I found a ZEISS IKON NETTAR at a vintage camera stall. Nearly 90 years old, it sat between light meters and cracked lenses—quiet and unassuming.
The shutter still fired. The bellows looked intact. I paid £20 and walked away without testing it. Something about the weight of it in my hands felt right, as if it still remembered how to see.
A few weeks later, I packed it for a solo hike up Yr Wyddfa in Wales. The night before I left, I rewatched The Salt of the Earth, the documentary on Sebastião Salgado. I first encountered his work in 2016, through Workers, a project that profoundly shifted how I understood photography. Salgado’s images weren’t about spectacle. They were about dignity. Stillness. Patience.
That morning on the mountain, the weather was moody clouds dragging low across the ridges. About halfway up, I stopped at a curve overlooking two glacial lakes. I set up my tripod and unfolded the NETTAR. Each press of the shutter felt slow and deliberate, like something ceremonial.
A man walking with his son and grandson paused nearby. He nudged the boy forward to look at the strange old camera. The boy’s fascination was quiet but intense. That small moment four generations connected by a machine made in another century stuck with me.
When I returned and developed the film, I expected nothing. But the photos came back grainy, soft, imperfect, and alive. One frame in particular, the lakes under a brooding sky, felt like more than a picture. It felt like a memory shared between time and image.
At the time, I didn’t know that Salgado would pass away just months later, in May 2025, at the age of 81. When the news came, I went back to those pictures. They looked different now. Not in quality, but in meaning.
Salgado once said, “The photographer does not make the picture, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.”
And: “We are a ferocious animal. We humans are terrible animals. Our history is a history of wars. It’s an endless story, a tale of madness.”
— Sebastião Salgado, The Salt of the Earth (2014)
That grace, I think, is what I found on that mountain with an old camera, a passing family, and a borrowed moment of stillness.
This is for him.
For Sebastião.
For the tools that endure.
And for the quiet act of paying attention.
About the author: Yousuf Sarfaraz is an Indian photographer based in London. His distinctive practice revolves around photographing the often unseen or overlooked aspects of people, places, and situations, presenting them to a broader audience to ignite curiosity, exploration, and transformation. Yousuf’s work is deeply rooted in journalistic principles. For Yousuf, photography serves as a powerful medium to instigate change and unveil realities, providing a visual narrative that transcends the limitations of words. You can find more of his work on his website and Instagram.
