The Cote d’Azure is only about a 4 hour’s drive from the other end of my native southern France, but I seem to only visit the posh bit occasionally now and always with cameras. I have a few resounding memories connected to Nice but there are three in particular. The first was staying there on the way back from a Farmer family 3month road trip through Italy and being saddened by encountering beggars from a different continent lining the posh promenade like derelict fallen street decorations. I was from London and homelessness was not a new sight to these ten year old eyes, but in the context of a paradise rather than a grimy English city that imagery stayed with me for life.
The second would rename the city of the celebrity to me for good. The picture desk of the London news agency I worked at would have incoming ISDN alerts pop up in the early days of digital image transmission and my quick witted Essex boss (I’ve always considered Essex one of the better English senses of humour) called out ‘Who’s Nice Martin?’ one morning. Some visualise sweet, flat sugary biscuits when they hear the name Nice but I just imagine a bloke called Nice Martin and whenever I see the newspaper itself, I smile knowing they don’t even know they could have a better name just by adding an R.
And the third memory was when I knew The Belgian and I were headed there on one of our road trips to photograph cyclists, I felt I should finally do what everyone else on planet Instagram had done there, pose in front of the giant red, white and blue Nice hashtag on the seafront. In some ways I’ve always embraced tourism, thinking the facade of the obvious is often wrongly shunned in favour of realism when visiting somewhere. So tourist trips to famous buildings like Brussels’ Atomium to have chips for lunch and buy a snow globe to remember them by feels perfectly acceptable to me. Seeing Instagram dream life contender hopefuls lined up waiting for their turn to transmit an alternative reality to the world made me think of the countless numbers of tourists that had asked me to stop and photograph them in front of Tower Bridge as I walked to that picture desk in central London. I always thought I should ask them to email me a copy and I could make a kitsch coffee table book of a decade of tourist moments, each one the same like Harvey Keitel’s photo book in the film Smoke, but that would have just been weird and I didn’t. And nor it transpired did I take my turn in the queue for a hashtag.
I did however witness the most incredible interpretation of parking rules I’d seen since Turin in 1984. Nice parking etiquette is to be experienced rather than explained, but I think our Belgian immigrant Renault will forever wear the evidence of it’s initiation.
We walked the last stretch of our journey, to a cafe made of cyclists in an idyllic quayside populated by armed super-rich Russians floating in another world from hashtags and double parking.
My first impression of Cafe du Cycliste was of a calmness of various coffee escapes. Seated here were a mixture of cyclists and youthful design conscious professionals sipping from small steaming cups and folding newspaper pages or scrolling trackpads. They fitted with the ambience of a designer boutique that piped the smell of fresh coffee into the room. The occasional unmistakable sound of cleats unclipping then clopping over hard floors in enclosed spaces would click clack into the immediate atmosphere as if to confirm the identity of the establishment and remind you why you were here at all.
As ever the Belgian had the harder job, to turn this coffee spot ambience into the basis of a story about the man we were about to meet and then follow into the hills on a bike, Remi Clermont – the founder of the Cafe du Cycliste.
Disengaged, while questions were asked, ideas formed and notes taken by the constantly caffeinated Belgian opposite, I wandered freely mixing the task of pressing the buttons with the temptation of trying on clothes.
Dotted about the subtle displays of cycle style aspiration and huge map displays of the world famous local hills were bikes as furniture. Though not that magnetic Titanium does tend to naturally draw me closer and I found the custom Cafe du Cycliste polka dotted Passoni frame’s tractor beam switched on.
Remi appeared in a subtle muted green get up, helmet in hand and my window shopping turned into button pressing instantly. It’s definitely a way to see somewhere, to follow a cyclist with a camera, if I were more switched on I’d take extra photographs on these jaunts and create photographic rough guides to cycling destinations but as with Tower Bridge that’s remains an unexploited passive photographic idea. I could however create a different coffee table book of my accidental out takes that every endeavor yields. The shot of the ground as the camera is grabbed, or the even more common one of the back of my calves as it fires when slung round a shoulder or balanced over one on a monopod are the usual suspects.
We swooped around the cols above Nice for an afternoon, into short tunnels and on to wide open vistas, alone in that unimaginable way a mountain road of such beauty could be, but for the occasional group of pedals and a nod or a wave. All the time The Belgian having the harder challenge of concocting narrative to hold interest out of this situation while steering me round mountain passes and my just choosing locations or lenses asking to stop and recording what unveiled as a result.
Back at the cafe there was a brief reconnection to the caffeinated intravenous feed while I found the moment to make a portrait of the man we’d come to visit. Once again it was an out take when all was said and done, that was the keeper.
I would return to this area in future with cyclists and bike races alike but at this point these hills were new to me apart from the connotation of names like Madone, and I could really see why they drew all the attention. In Fact why they drew all the millionaires’ isolated on land islands of rock peaks and views. It was like nowhere I’d seen before first hand. Other worldly would be an appropriate description of these pricey enclaves to a London boy like me. It was another country compared to my side of the south of France a few hundred miles west and the kind of place I could understand going to for a coffee one morning.