I now carry a Ricoh GR IV Monochrome with me. Always. Not as a replacement for the Leica M10 Monochrom, because that would be the kind of silly internet melodrama people seem to enjoy when they have nothing better to do. The Leica is still my main camera, still the one that feels like an extension of intent, weight, and commitment. The Ricoh plays a different role. It is the camera that slips into the cracks of the day. The one that stays with me when everything else is too much, too large, too deliberate, too noble for the simple act of being out in the street and paying attention.

That is the point. Not portability as a lifestyle cliche, but availability as a way of seeing. The best camera is not the one that wins forum arguments. It is the one that is there when the street decides to stop pretending. This little monochrome compact lets me work closer to impulse, closer to fracture, closer to the raw visual interruptions that usually disappear while you are still thinking about focal lengths, bags, or photographic dignity. With it, I have started to experiment with different ways of looking at what surrounds me: harsher crops, unstable angles, dirtier gestures, less reverence, more collision. Things are still taking shape, and thankfully so. Anything too finished too early is usually dead on arrival.

That is why I have opened a new section on the website called Provoke. The name is a deliberate homage to the Japanese photographic movement that understood something many people still miss: photography does not need to be clean to be honest, and it certainly does not need to be polite to be alive. Grain, blur, abrasion, fragmentation, visual tension, disobedient framing… none of that is a flaw when it serves the emotional truth of the image. Sometimes the street is not offering you grace. Sometimes it offers pressure, noise, scars, and brief alignments of concrete, steel, shadow, and light. Pretending otherwise produces nice pictures, perhaps. I am after something a bit less obedient.

The images I am starting to place in Provoke are direct JPEG from the camera. No Lightroom. No post-processing. No digital makeup session afterwards to reassure the nervous. What you see is what the camera gave me in the instant, and that matters. I want to trust the camera’s response, but also my own reflex at the moment of contact. These frames are not trying to be precious. They are fragments, scratches, abrupt visual notes taken while moving through the city. A chalk line that becomes an attack on the frame. A sink that turns into an apparition. A pavement edge, a traffic mark, a pole, a slab of darkness cut by white. Ordinary things, obviously. Which is exactly why they matter. Street photography does not need spectacle. It needs tension. It needs form under pressure. It needs the city to reveal itself without costume.

So yes, the Leica M10 Monochrom remains the camera of depth, intention, and long-form commitment. But the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome has already earned its place beside it as the camera of instinct, interruption, and permanent readiness. Provoke is where that side of my work will live: rougher, quicker, more fragmentary, more experimental, and probably more honest because of it.

Technical: Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.

Series: Provoke.