Not danger. Danger is usually honest.

What makes me nervous is the small theater of ordinary life. The half-second before a stranger notices the camera. The elevator silence. The bright shop window where everyone looks arranged by a mediocre god. The clean surfaces people build around themselves so nobody has to admit they are lost, lonely, ridiculous, or hungry for something they can’t name.

That makes me nervous.

I walk the street looking for fractures. A gesture that doesn’t fit the face. A shadow that cuts a body in two. A wall that looks more alive than the person leaning against it. Most people try very hard not to be seen. Then they spend their whole lives performing. It is a beautiful contradiction, and a sick one.

Photography lives there.

What unsettles me is not failure. Failure is cheap and everywhere. What unsettles me is falseness. The dead image. The polite image. The photograph that explains too much and risks nothing. I would rather keep the blur, the grain, the imbalance, the dirty light, if they still carry a pulse. Perfection is often just a well-ironed lie.

That is why black and white calms me down while it also makes me more alert. It removes the decorative excuse. No seduction by color, no cosmetic mercy. Just structure, tension, skin, concrete, smoke, glare, fatigue. The world with its makeup stripped off. Crueler, perhaps. Also more accurate. That pull toward monochrome street photography, and toward something rawer in the spirit of Provoke, is not an aesthetic trick for me. It is a way of getting closer to the fever underneath appearances.

Maybe that is the real answer. I get nervous in front of the distance between what things are and what they pretend to be. A camera does not solve that. It only gives me a method for walking into it.

Some days I use the Leica M10 Monochrom. Other days the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome. The machine matters less than the tremor. I am not trying to make the street look elegant. I am trying to catch it while it is still thinking of becoming something else.

Nervousness, in the end, is a form of attention. A bad night with open eyes. A suspicion that reality is never finished dressing itself before you arrive.

That is useful.

That is where the photograph begins.