Nine years after I gave up legal practice, I have stopped calling myself a lawyer. If you ask me now, I would say I am a photographer. I devoted my professional career to words and now I am trying to develop my visual sense. I don't do it professionally. I don't need to. I just love it and enjoy the challenge of trying to be good at it. It's a wonderful craft to open ones eyes to the world and to see it differently. Armed with a camera, I have noticed details of both my neighbourhood and the places I have travelled that I would otherwise have passed unseen. These days, I generally just won't go where my camera isn't welcome.

Visual literacy comes from "reading" lots of images – as many as possible by the Austens and Dickenses of the photographic world. In my morning feed of my favourite sites on the web, there are now as many photographers as writers. They seem to be mostly of the artsy-luvvie tendency. I remember a portraiture workshop with an eminent photographer (several of his portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery) who directed his model to adopt the expression of "someone nice, like a left-wing politician". He was not being provocative and seemed genuinely puzzled when I bridled. When it came to my turn to have a go, I asked her to give me her "most evil, grasping look" while making a clenched fist salute. I pointed out to my eminent tutor that there is nothing "nice" about the people who had taken most of my life's work by force to bribe their voters to keep them in parasitical idleness.

This low-octane, mostly lowbrow wingnuttery applies despite (or perhaps because) of the fact that photographers work in a hard-fought, competitive market. The ubiquity of camera phones means there are now few full-time newspaper photographers, for example. Television killed the photo magazines where the "greats" of photography mostly earned their crusts. The rise of Getty Images and the like has destroyed residual income from stock photography. More images are being generated than ever, but less money is being earned for making them. Their main problem is like that of actors, however. It's a fun, creative job that many people want to do but there are too few customers to pay more than a minority of them. If they were not so disdainful about economics, both professions would find the outcome of that predictable. Mostly they just see it as "wrong" however.

There are playful souls among them but they tend to be more than averagely earnest. There's an historical reason for that. In the early days of photography it was derided by fine artists as mere mechanical trickery. Painters and sculptors thought of photographers as the Church had once thought of them  - as low class artisans unworthy of respect and to be cheated of their pay wherever possible. In consequence photographic pioneers longed to be seen as artists too and paid a lot of attention to "serious" subjects and "social" issues.

An art form needs to be well-established and respectable before its practitioners can have fun with it. The headspace of many photographers is very much in what I call "Magnum World" – a dark, miserable oppressed place plagued by manifold injustices, as portrayed by the members of the Magnum Photo Agency. If Earth feared invasion by hostile aliens, our best defence would be to broadcast electronic slideshows of Magnum photographs. The invaders would react like the Roman legions on reaching Scotland and advance no further, leaving us poor miserable Earthlings to our poverty-stricken suffering and oppression behind a galactic Hadrian's Wall.

In amateur photography, the comfortable pensions of teachers and university lecturers mean there are far too many of them in a leisure field that requires a certain amount of investment in kit - adding further layers of pseudo-intellectual pomposity, musty from a lifetime of never being challenged. I am a member of the Royal Photographic Society, but though I enjoy a few of its workshops from time to time, mostly find its members smug and insufferable. I hesitate every year before renewing. Its beautifully produced magazine, for example, unquestioningly peddles the conventional thinking of the BBC class. I have learned to appreciate the images while ignoring the priggish text around them. 

You may think I would find this milieu uncomfortable, but I rather enjoy it. I am missing my photographic comrades during lockdown. Exchanges like the one I mention above are rare. I don't pick fights. I concentrate on their skills not their views, learn from them and move on. They are no worse than most of my rich, West London neighbours – and at least the photographers have a job description that makes sense and occasionally bring some beauty into the world.

Finally, in my last post I wrote of confirmation bias among journalists and bloggers. I have noticed the same thing among photographers. The camera doesn't lie, but photographers can and often do. Their choice of lens can make the same group of people look rashly hugger mugger or responsibly social-distanced, for example. Their choice depends on how they want you to see the world – and who doesn't want others to see the world as they do themselves? The photographer is sometimes consciously deceiving his viewer but more often is first lying to himself. Attending many photo workshops has proved to me repeatedly that photographers standing in the same location with similar equipment will produce very different images. That difference seems to depend just as much on their metaphorical point of view as their literal one.

I took up photography seriously a few years ago. After a wordy life practising law, I thought it would make a change to focus on my visual sense in retirement.  To my surprise it has become important to me. So when I received an invitation to attend the press preview of a new photography exhibition at the Museum of London, I accepted with curiosity and a little dread. Why dread? Well photography was disdained as a merely mechanical process in its early days and pioneering art photographers, in their anxiety to be taken seriously, rather tended to overdo the worthiness of their subjects. They concentrated on the dark and dismal and sought out "social" meaning in every frame. Their successors have tended to follow suit. Too many photo exhibitions exist in what I call "Magnum World" – a parallel dimension named for the ineffably "worthy" Magnum Photo Agency – where dismal and depressed denizens raise their sickly children in squalor and without hope. Any happy, successful people appear there only to heighten the sense of injustice and despair.

If when I die, I go to hell, it will be Magnum World.

Fortunately though the night life of our capital involves, of course, a fair share of misery the curator – Anna Sparham – has taken a more nuanced approach. She has included images ranging from the dark to the celebratory. The subject of the exhibition – London at night  – is ambitiously broad. It could easily have resulted in a meaningless jumble of pictures that left no lasting impression. The exhibition features photographs by pioneers like Paul Martin and "greats" like Bill Brandt, but also by amateurs shooting for their camera clubs. It features early images from when long exposures could first be made by gaslight through to the modern era. Anna has arranged them into three broadly themed sections entitled "London Illuminated." "Dark Matters" and "Switch on, Switch off".  Taken together they create a very satisfying portrayal of a great city and its people at night.

The London Nights exhibition is running at the Museum of London from 11th May to 11th November and tickets can be bought here. The museum has other interesting collections (currently including one about the suffragettes) and is always worth a visit anyway.

Finding myself near my regular haunts at the Barbican, I also took the opportunity to visit the Another Kind of Life photo exhibition now running there (but soon to close). This features many works by famous photographers and so there is a lot of high quality imagery. Alas, almost all of it is not only from "Magnum World" but also shoe-horned into a politically-correct narrative.

I enjoyed some of the work from a technical point of view. I could not fail to appreciate the photographs by the late Mary Ellen Mark, for example. I even actually liked some photos by Igor Palmin of Russian hippies in Soviet times. These were rebels – unlike their narcissistic Western counterparts – with an actual cause. There's good photography here but I am glad I had another, better reason to travel to the City from West London!

My friends from London invited me along on an artistic excursion yesterday. I picked them up from their hotel (rare use being made of Speranza's +1 seat — there's no +2 when the driver is 6'7" tall) and we headed to the Fondation Maeght gallery in Saint-Paul de Vence. I like art. I have a modest collection of paintings — all modern. I think it's amusing how old some "modern" art now is and wonder how useful a category it really is these days. 

I loved the Fondation's buildings. They nestle on a steep wooded hill and provide a wonderful exhibition space. The collection is a very mixed bag, which says more about the collectors than the artists. There were many pieces I would give house room to, if I had a roomy enough house. But one piece by the Bulgarian artist Christo dominates much of the gallery during a current exhibition. His "mastaba" made of one thousand one hundred and six brightly painted oil drums stands in a courtyard. That I rather enjoyed, if only for the photographic opportunities presented by the coloured shade it cast. But drawings and models of it — and other versions of it, actual and proposed — took up room after room inside. There are only so many oil drums presented as art that a sane chap can see without giggling. Especially if he's rash enough to read the explanations on the gallery walls.

I love the French language. My only criticism is that it's so musical it makes wicked things sound appealing (e.g. "fiscaliste, impôts, l'État"). It needs some ugly sounds to prevent French people being drawn to ugly concepts. A serious obstacle to the enjoyment of art anywhere is the self-worshipping pomposity of dealers, curators and (sad to say) some artists and when that is compounded by the ferocious up-themselvesness of French intellectuals it's just hilarious.

After a modest but agreeable lunch at a pavement café we headed off to see what Matisse appparently thought was his greatest work, the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. I beg to differ with his assessment, but it is an attractive and spiritual place, promoting calm reflection. I confess that I am prejudiced against any place that prohibits natural light photography (as non-invasive an activity as could be conceived) so perhaps all the rules raised my hackles and prevented me enjoying it as I should. It's an excellent piece of interior design inside a mediocre piece of architecture, embellished by some wonderful stained glass, delightful drawings and imaginative vestments designed by the great man. 

I dropped my friends off so they could taxi to their next hotel in Juan les Pins. I drove home to Mougins and processed the day's photos. A couple of hours later we met again in Antibes where they introduced me to other friends of theirs; an Irish couple  at whose place in St Tropez they are going to stay on the next leg of their tour of French pleasures.