I was photographing 60 Threadneedle Street for Eric Parry when the Old Stock Exchange Tower dropped a ton of shattered glass on me.
There is no good way to describe the sound except to say that it arrived before meaning. Something between a train wreck and a large explosion. The incoming glass sprayed across the street like water from a faucet. The shrapnel knocked me and my camera down. When I stood up, the street was altered. A field of shattered fragments. My Phase One P45 digital back was broken. These frames were the last it would ever make.
The street outside an office building in the City of London promises continuity. It promises that gravity will behave. It promises windows will remain fenestrated.
This was supposed to be another day behind the tripod, quiet, reflective, thoughtful, it was ordinary until it wasn’t. The camera is a tool of confidence. It says this moment can be kept. It says this surface is reliable. When the glass fell, that confidence was exposed as provisional.
I was there to record a building that took restraint seriously. Parry’s work at Threadneedle Street had avoided the theatrical certainty of its neighbours. Between Lloyd’s Building and No 1 Poultry, the project chose a quieter intelligence. It dealt with light, scale, and movement without shouting. The building understood that the city is not a stage set but a working environment where small decisions accumulate into lived experience.
Photography shares that ethic at its best. It is not about the decisive moment as a trick. It is about judgment under imperfect information. You choose a position. You commit to it. You accept responsibility for what enters the frame and what does not. When something fails, the failure is not abstract. It has weight.
The loss of the camera mattered to me, but not because of its price or its rarity. Tools accrue memory. They carry the residue of places and decisions. That back had been with me across continents. It had been a silent witness to a moment when I renounced film and moved to digital. Its end was abrupt and unromantic. That too is a kind of truth.
Being in the right place at the wrong time is not a curse. It is a description of work. If you stay long enough, if you pay attention long enough, the world will test your assumptions. The photographer’s task is not to dramatize that test, but to register it honestly and to keep working with whatever remains.
The last images from that camera do not show the falling glass. They show a building doing what it was designed to do, shaping light, holding space, offering calm. I value them for that. They remind me that meaning is not only found at the point of impact. Often it sits quietly, waiting for someone to notice, just before everything changes.
