Horological Meandering

Jack Forster
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Beautiful! Your craft as a photographer. . .

. . .is never less than masterful.  I think we're getting to where it's as much of a challenge for the watches you photograph to live up to your photography as it is for the photos to do justice to the watches ;-) .

You know, I have a confession to make.  I am of two VERY different minds about DeBethune; or perhaps I should say their designs evoke very mixed feelings.  They're completely distinctive; DeBethune watches have an identity all their own and to my eye a certain appealing- I don't know what to call it, 'craziness' or 'weirdness' sounds altogether too pejorative but they're both accurate terms if you can just leave out the negatively judgemental connotations.  They have an almost out of place look- there's something about the super high tech lines and deliberate hyper modernity that makes them feel disconnected, in a way, from watchmaking in general- almost as if they're not really watches, but some other kind of bizarre mechanical device altogether.

Yet at the same time, there's something about them that I feel is distancing and I am not quite sure what.  There is something (just to my personal taste) cold and angular about a lot of their designs; the finish is SO diamond sharp that I get an impression of unapproachability.  Now I've never seen the watches in person, but between that and some of the mechanical innovations- the balance and escapement system in particular seems a trifle striving for effect- I just find it hard to feel like I could warm up to them.

Of course it could just be my provincialism- God knows my own personal tastes tend towards the extremely conservative (with some exceptions- MB&F HM1 is a notable exception but as I've said elsewhere I actually find that a pretty classically designed watch in a lot of respects) so maybe I'm just the horological equivalent of a dumbstruck country boy looking at the thoroughbred lines of an Italian supermodel (why Italian?  Supermodels come in a plurality of provenances, I've noticed ;-) ) wondering how he'd hug the woman without getting a papercut ;-) .

Jack