"Nobody Came Back for the Green One," Says Cosima Ferrant
In a second-floor studio in Bordeaux, a photographer keeps a catalogue of 2,304 forgotten umbrellas, and the October rain is already adding to it.
The green umbrella hangs from a nail by the studio door, handle out, like a coat waiting for a guest. Cosima Ferrant walks past it twice while we talk. Both times she touches the strap.
She has photographed the lost umbrellas of Bordeaux since 2014. The studio is two rooms above a shuttered tobacconist in Chartrons. There are 2,304 umbrellas in the archive. Some are on shelves, some in crates, and eleven are open on the radiator, drying.
Her method has not changed. She finds one on a tram bench, a railing, or the quay along the Garonne. She photographs it where it lies, with a compact camera and a flash that makes the wet shine. Then she carries it home and photographs it again against a grey sheet. A card goes in the folder with the date, the street and the hour, in pencil.
The green one is number 0417. Bottle green, wooden handle, one bent rib. She found it on 14 October 2017 at ten past seven in the morning, on a bench by the river. It was not dropped. It was folded, and the strap was fastened with the popper done up. "Someone sat down and tied it properly," she says. "Then they stood up and left. That is not losing. That is a decision."
She corrects me when I say lost. "Lost is when you go looking. These were left."
Of the 2,304, exactly 311 have been claimed. Owners find her through the photographs pinned up by the door. She makes them describe the thing first. A woman once got the handle right but not the colour, and went home empty-handed. The green one has had no visitors in nine years. Not a call, not a letter, not a person who thought it might be theirs.
"I always check it for good manners," she says. "It has the best manners in the building."
October is her busiest month. Forty-one umbrellas so far, and the month has two days left. Last Thursday the wind took nine off one stretch of the quay in an hour. She counted them from a doorway, and by the time she crossed the road two had gone into the river. She says she does not mind the rain. It brings her work, and it brings her company.
She will not sell prints. A gallery has asked twice. She told them the umbrellas are not finished, which is true, and that she is not either.
When I leave, it is raining properly, the thin sideways kind. I have no umbrella. Cosima looks at me, then at the nail by the door, and then back at me.
"Not that one," she says. "It is spoken for."
I ask by whom.
"Whoever."
