“The camera enables us to keep a sort of visual chronicle. For me, it is my diary.”
Not since Mary Queen of Scots has there been such a splendid alliance of France and Scotland. For six years now, Frog and Scot has been enticing hungry clientele with its wall hung blackboard menus. It’s open for lunch and dinner Monday to Sunday. The French coast may be visible from Deal beach on a clear day but the bistro’s name is derived from its owners Benoit Dezecot and Sarah Ross’s origins. In the shrinking sunlit hours of a passing summer, pavement tables are in hot demand. French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, in The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, proved he was as adept with words as pictures.
“Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever-attentive eye, which captures the moment and its eternity.”
“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing a meditation.”
That bastion of French taste, The Michelin Guide, describes Frog and Scot as, “A quirky bistro with yellow canopies and mismatched furnishings… Large blackboard menus list; refined, innately simple dishes which let the ingredients do the talking.” Lunch is absolutely flawless, drawing the coastal elite and a few interlopers. The day can continue a few doors down in Le Pinardier, a wine shop and bar, also owned by Monsieur Dezecot and Ms Ross.
“We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.”