The weirdest coincidence I’ve ever experienced didn’t happen to me. It happened inside one of my photographs.
At a fairground, I raised the camera because of an embrace, an exposed arm and a small cactus tattooed above the word Strong. That was enough.
Later, while editing, I noticed the rest: three female figures with dark hair and black tops, all facing away from me, arranged from largest to smallest. They looked like three versions of the same person, or one life moving backwards through the frame.
I hadn’t planned any of it. For a fraction of a second, the street put everything in exactly the right place.
The camera noticed the joke before I did. As usual.
One tradition I never really get tired of is Sant Joan in Ciutadella, Menorca.
It is supposed to be about horses, riders, music and rituals that have been repeated for generations. And it is. But once you are actually there, squeezed into a street with far too many people, it becomes something else as well.
There is noise everywhere. Horses suddenly rise above the crowd. Someone pushes past you. Someone else is trying not to spill a drink. People shout, wait, sweat, laugh, get tired. For a few seconds everything seems organised, and then it isn’t.
That part interests me more than the ceremony itself.
I have photographed Sant Joan several times, and I rarely find myself looking for the obvious picture. A horse against an old stone building can be beautiful, certainly. But I usually end up looking sideways. At the man pressed against a wall. A hand appearing between bodies. Someone watching instead of celebrating. A face that looks completely exhausted while everybody around it is having the time of their lives.
Those little things are closer to the photography I normally make.
In black and white, Sant Joan also changes. A lot of the colour and spectacle disappears. What remains is sweat, skin, stone, dust, light, horses and people trying to occupy the same small piece of street.
And perhaps that is what I like about it.
The ritual may be centuries old, but the people inside it are still just people. They get distracted. They get tired. They behave strangely. They ruin perfect compositions.
Which, photographically, is usually when things start getting interesting.
One of my recent photographs has been selected by Progressive Street as photo of the week.
And yes, I am very happy about it. Happier than is probably dignified to admit in public.
It is the image of the boy running with a toy gun in his hand. A quick scene, almost caught out of the corner of the eye: the body in motion, the arm lowered, the direct look into the camera. I did not have much time to think. Better that way, probably. Had I thought too much, I would have missed it.
What I especially liked is the text that accompanies the selection. It does not settle for the easy reading. It talks about play, childhood aggression, and the difference between a toy gun and real violence. But it also lets in that unavoidable unease: in some places, children do not play at war. They are dragged into it.
That ambiguity is, for me, what holds the photograph together. I do not know whether it is innocent, unsettling, or simply something that happened in front of me for half a second. Maybe all of it at once. The street does not ask permission to be contradictory.
Seeing it published by Progressive Street already made my day. Seeing it placed, even loosely, in conversation with photographs by William Klein and Diane Arbus is slightly dizzying. I am not going to pretend I belong at that height, because I still have a little shame left. But having one of my photographs read in that visual territory is a gift. A big one.
Thank you to Progressive Street and Batseba Hardy for looking at this image with such care.
Now I will pretend I have not refreshed the page too many times.
This week began with faces, bodies and doorways. Not portraits in the polite sense. Nobody was arranged, softened, rescued or turned into a small monument of dignity for the comfort of the viewer. The camera stayed close to the edge of the street: entrances, shopfronts, walls, bad light, tired hands, cigarettes, walkers, plastic stools, small signs, objects waiting longer than people.
The fifth portrait sits at the end of that line.
An older man rests outside a small shop. A walker stands in front of him, almost more frontal than the body itself. Behind him, the window is full of clocks and small objects, the kind of things that belong to shops where time seems to have stopped out of habit, not nostalgia. A handwritten sign announces watches on sale.
Time is cheap in the window. Waiting is not.
That small joke is what keeps the photograph from becoming too solemn. The frame has enough weight already: the seated body, the walker, the shop entrance, the crowded glass, the stool, the cup, the little domestic debris of the pavement. Everything is slightly too much, and that is why it works. The city does not give the man a clean background. It gives him inventory.
The five portraits from this week have been circling the same problem: how a body occupies a narrow piece of public space when there is no proper place to be. A doorway becomes a chair. A wall becomes support. A shopfront becomes weather. The street does not stage these things. It just leaves them there, badly lit and perfectly clear.
Next week, the frame opens wider.
The portraits will give way to a Barcelona street series: less face, more city; less individual tension, more pavement, shutters, glass, crossings, corners and people reduced to the size the city allows them. Not Barcelona as postcard. Not Barcelona as Mediterranean mood with clean typography and rental prices from another moral universe.
Barcelona as pressure.
This photograph stays between both weeks. It belongs to the portraits, but it already points beyond them. The man is there, unmistakably, but the shop window is also there, doing its quiet damage. The clocks, the walker, the sign, the pavement. A whole city compressed into a bad little arrangement nobody designed and nobody will fix.
The street keeps excellent records. It just refuses to file them properly.
The sun is not fair here, and it does not try to be.
A man stays a few steps behind, dressed in white, cut open by hard light. His mouth is half open, his hand is caught in the middle of a gesture, and his eyes are already somewhere outside the frame. In front of him, a woman crosses the foreground with her cap low and a smile almost buried inside the shadow. She is larger in the photograph, but she does not explain it. He is smaller, but louder.
The street adds the rest: open asphalt, white lines, façades, traffic lights, bicycles, a motorcycle in the distance, and that exact amount of city that always feels slightly excessive. There is no clean stage here. There is urban pressure. The background does not support the figures; it pushes against them. The city pretends to be a neutral surface, because cities enjoy that little fraud. It is not neutral. The asphalt carries weight, the crosswalk cuts the frame, the façades stand there with the old confidence of things that never apologize.
In the first version, the whites on the man’s clothes were too loud. The tank top and shorts could have dragged the photograph into that miserable territory where everything starts to look like a detergent commercial that took a wrong turn. The highlight warnings were useful, but not as commandments. They only showed where the image was beginning to lose flesh.
The edit moved in the opposite direction: control the whites without killing them, keep the shadow under the cap without opening it too much, give a little more weight to the man’s gesture, and let the background remain a city without letting it take over the room. The shadow on her face is not a heroic rescue mission. It belongs there. Some shadows have earned the right to stay closed.
The final crop pulls the frame closer to the two bodies. It removes loose air, cuts down the postcard architecture, and leaves the scene in a more physical place. The point is not to make the photograph cleaner. The point is to make it readable without disinfecting it, a very human habit and, frankly, a suspicious one.
This image belongs to Hard Light because the light is not just a technical condition. It is the force arranging the frame. It also brushes against Urban Wildlife: two bodies crossing the city like half-civilized urban animals, each with a direction, a temperature, and a small private defence.
The street does not give them a story. It gives them too much light, a strip of asphalt, and two directions that do not quite agree.
Technical: Ricoh GR IV Monochrome · Lightroom Classic.
Fotografías de guerra (1974-1985) arrives with dust, iron, and a white light that hurts the eyes. The book demands a steady stomach, a still gaze, and very little faith in grand words.
On the cover, an armed man aims at an empty horizon. His body carries the tension: the bent back, the long rifle, the pale clothes, the desert ahead. War is reduced to a posture. A way of crouching. A way of waiting for something worse to happen.
The selected photographs have a dryness that works in their favour. There is grain, dust, walls scorched by the sun, sweaty clothes, weapons that weigh too much, and bodies settled into an almost physical discomfort. War, seen like this, sheds rhetoric and gathers dirt. It also gathers weight. The exact weight of a weapon, of a pocked wall, of a man crouched for too long under a light that flattens everything.
One of the hardest images is that of the fighter running with the rifle across his back. The body is caught mid-thrust, low, almost animal. The violence comes from the movement, from the dust, from that slightly ridiculous urgency of running with death slung over your back. War puts men into absurd postures and then asks them to call it heroism. Humanity, once organised, produces admirable documents and massacres with logistics.
In another scene, three figures occupy a terrace or a half-ruined space. On the left, a man aims. In the centre, another throws something against a white wall covered in marks. On the right, a young woman waits with her rifle horizontal, crouched, too still for what is happening around her. The floor is filthy: rubble, puddles, scattered fragments. The wall ends up ruling the image. White, dry, punctured. A punished surface that seems more alive than the people hiding beside it.
The photograph of the silhouette inside the dark opening holds in another way. The face is eaten by shadow. Only the outline of the hair, the rifle, and the city in the background remain visible. It is a quiet, persistent image. War appears there as a way of inhabiting the edge: looking from a hole, waiting from a dirty place, turning a window into a trench. Outside there are still buildings. Perhaps ordinary windows. Perhaps someone boiling coffee. History has always had this lack of manners: some shoot while others try to get on with the day.
There are also portraits in which the fighter seems dressed up as himself. A man with a turban and large goggles sits in a vehicle, with a weapon beside him and the desert behind. The goggles cover his eyes and turn him into a strange, almost unreal figure. Everything around him weighs too much: the light, the vehicle, the weapon, the empty horizon. The desert leaves things with no excuse.
In another photograph, a man fires a machine gun from a rooftop. The belt of bullets falls like a metallic tail. Arm, jaw, torso: everything is tense. It is a physical image, almost muscular. War remains in the imagined noise, in the recoil, in the clenched teeth. Black and white works effectively here because it removes distractions. The gesture remains. The weight remains. That poor, endlessly repeated human fantasy remains: controlling the world by pulling a trigger.
The book is at its best when it lets us forget the author’s name for a while. Pérez-Reverte carries a heavy public persona: the writer, the reporter, the academician, the professional polemicist, all that machinery trailing behind him. The photographs breathe better when they return to the place they came from: the ground, the short distance, the unstable moment, the eye that looks because it is still there.
These images bear witness. And witness, when it is good, offers little comfort. The disaster stays visible with an almost administrative dryness: wall, body, weapon, shadow, dust. All very simple. All dirty enough. The camera places a concrete proof there, so war loses the air of a grand word and returns to its real place: crouched bodies, marked walls, weapons taking up too much space, light falling without pity.
The reader is left before images that dirty the fingers. Someone was there. He looked. He fired the camera. And he came back with the kind of material that time can store, however cowardly an archivist time may be.
You can buy this book here with a 5% discount and free shipping.
A few portraits from Barcelona, taken over the weekend.
Close faces. Shopfronts. Glass. Traffic. Tired walls. People holding their place while the city keeps pushing behind them.
These are not quiet portraits, even when nothing dramatic is happening. That is partly why I like them. Nobody is performing much, but the frame still feels crowded: hands, eyes, cheap objects, passing bodies, the small pressure of the street.
I am not looking for grand character studies here. No heroic street mythology. Just people seen at close range, with very little room to become elegant.
Some look straight back. Some seem half elsewhere. The city does not soften around them. It stays there: dirty, busy, indifferent, useful.
This small weekend series sits inside Portraits, close to the rougher edge of StreetSoul. More this weekend.
That is not a complaint. It is probably the most honest part of street photography. The street does not owe you a frame. It does not arrange people, light, walls, traffic, dogs, shop windows, or civic failure into something useful just because you left the house with a camera.
This Field Note starts there: with the plain fact that most walking is waste.
Not useless waste. Useful waste. The kind that sharpens the eye by refusing to reward it too quickly. You walk, you look, you miss. A corner almost gives you something. A figure arrives too late. A shadow is good but the body is wrong. A wall has promise and then behaves like a wall, which is rude but common.
The video is not a tutorial. There is no secret method, no heroic street photography lesson, no little sermon about learning to see. It is just a record of the process before the photograph becomes clean enough to pretend it was inevitable.
It was not inevitable.
The few frames that stayed did so because they had some pressure inside them: a gesture that did not explain itself, a face caught in a small private weather, a body placed badly enough to become interesting, light doing more damage than decoration. That is usually enough. Not much, but enough.
The camera only records part of the walk. The edit decides what the walk was worth.
That is the part I care about most: not the moment of shooting, but the later cruelty of selection. Most frames die quietly. A few survive because they still resist after the first look, after the crop, after the contrast, after the temptation to make them nicer than they deserve.
StreetSoul Field Notes will follow that line: the walk before the photograph, the failures around the frame, the small decisions that keep one image and leave the rest behind.
That is not a complaint. It is probably the most honest part of street photography. The street does not owe you a frame. It does not arrange people, light, walls, traffic, dogs, shop windows, or civic failure into something useful just because you left the house with a camera.
This Field Note starts there: with the plain fact that most walking is waste.
Not useless waste. Useful waste. The kind that sharpens the eye by refusing to reward it too quickly. You walk, you look, you miss. A corner almost gives you something. A figure arrives too late. A shadow is good but the body is wrong. A wall has promise and then behaves like a wall, which is rude but common.
The video is not a tutorial. There is no secret method, no heroic street photography lesson, no little sermon about learning to see. It is just a record of the process before the photograph becomes clean enough to pretend it was inevitable.
It was not inevitable.
The few frames that stayed did so because they had some pressure inside them: a gesture that did not explain itself, a face caught in a small private weather, a body placed badly enough to become interesting, light doing more damage than decoration. That is usually enough. Not much, but enough.
The camera only records part of the walk. The edit decides what the walk was worth.
That is the part I care about most: not the moment of shooting, but the later cruelty of selection. Most frames die quietly. A few survive because they still resist after the first look, after the crop, after the contrast, after the temptation to make them nicer than they deserve.
StreetSoul Field Notes will follow that line: the walk before the photograph, the failures around the frame, the small decisions that keep one image and leave the rest behind.
Technical note: Ricoh GR IV Monochrome · Lightroom Classic.
The passage is low. On the left, a cold mural, a speaker and the musician in a white suit, standing at the microphone. Above, two lights too white blow out the ceiling. In the background, the exit toward the Ramblas and a row of lightboxes advertising fast food, exhibitions and anything else still capable of asking for half a second of attention.
The open case carries more weight than it seems. It faces the passage, waiting for people crossing the space without quite deciding whether to listen, look or keep walking. The musician stays off to one side. The case, almost at the center. Between them, the shiny floor opens a slightly unkind distance.
The photo could have stayed at the level of a curious postcard: “look, an Elvis in an underground passage.” What held me was something drier: the city placing music, advertising, exits, dirty light and indifference inside the same corridor. Everything mixed. Everything working at once. Delicacy, predictably, had taken the day off.
The passer-by in the background keeps the image from closing around the musician. He walks past the ads with an almost functional indifference. Elvis plays, the case waits, the ads shout, the man passes. The place continues.
When editing it, I stopped chasing a complete correction. The ceiling lights were partly blown out, and I kept them that way. I could have pulled them toward a cleaner, more presentable version, more obedient to that minor religion of the perfect histogram. But the light in the passage was hard, flat, a little cruel. Softening it too much changed the temperature of the scene.
The final crop tightens the triangle between the musician, the case and the passer-by. Only a little. There is still too much ceiling. Still too much reflection on the floor. Still that feeling of a poorly lit public place where everything happens and almost nothing stops.
This photo belongs in Absurd World because of the whole set: an underground passage, a musician dressed as Elvis, ads promising food and culture, an exit back to the surface, and a hostile light flattening everything. The city turns any presence into another layer of noise. Here, the noise wears a white suit.
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