A man and a woman walk toward the camera down a wet cobbled street at night, holding hands, both in dark coats. She is looking at him. He is looking ahead. Behind them the crowd, the tram and the coloured lights of some installation dissolve into a field of soft discs, and the pavement runs away under their feet as a broad grey wedge. It is a photograph, taken in the last few years, and it belongs to a picture type that is three hundred years old.

Everyone has seen these pictures even if they couldn’t name a single photographer who took them. Bardot barefoot on the quay. A crowd of nobodies in sunglasses outside a café. A car with the doors open and someone half in, half out of it. They get reposted constantly, sold as prints in shops that have nothing to do with the Var, and used as mood boards for holidays nobody is actually taking.