Category: Sense categoria

On June 26, 1977, La Rambla did not simply watch a demonstration pass by: it had to swallow a presence the country had preferred to keep outside the frame.

Nosaltres no tenim por, nosaltres som, by Colita, published by La Fábrica, returns to that day without turning it into a democratic postcard. Barcelona had just come out of the first elections after the dictatorship, but the street still smelled of surveillance, dirty laws, and old morality. Eleven days later, hundreds of people occupied La Rambla to demand sexual freedom. It was not a comfortable celebration. It was a public appearance. And at that moment, appearing in public was already a form of risk.

The book brings together forty photographs by Colita, along with texts that place them in context without locking them inside a display case. That matters. Visual memory, when polished too much, ends up looking like institutional furniture: correct, white, still, harmless. This volume avoids that excessive cleaning. The images still carry noise. They still have the street on them. Someone could almost step out of the frame and keep walking.

Colita does not photograph a cause already accepted. She photographs a collision. A group of bodies stepping in front of a city that still did not know whether to look at them, push them aside, or let the police do the dirty work. The banners matter, but they do not rule the scene alone. The faces do. The eyes. The open mouths. The hands. People moving forward without the later protection of anniversaries, exhibitions, and commemorative plaques. Before history becomes history, it is always someone being afraid in public.

The title has the force of a sentence that does not beg: Nosaltres no tenim por, nosaltres som. We are not afraid, we are. It does not ask for tolerance. It does not seek approval. It does not offer a polite request so normality can have time to digest it. It states existence. And in that context, that was far more uncomfortable than any well-mannered slogan. “We are” cuts clean. It does not decorate, soften, or apologise. Colita understands that force and lets it breathe.

Her gaze does not embalm the scene. Nor does it turn it into cheap epic. What appears in these photographs is more interesting than epic: a mixture of defiance, precariousness, nervous joy, and exposure. People in the street with the body as the only argument available. Democracy was still recent, but repression had not vanished at once, as if someone had switched off a light. Laws, stares, and batons have a longer memory than speeches.

One of the strongest images is the front line of the demonstration, with trans figures and travestis occupying the lead. That position is not ornamental. It is political because it is physical. Being at the front means receiving the gaze, the insult, the blow, the photograph, and history before anyone else. Colita records this without softening it. She does not turn those bodies into clean symbols. She lets them remain specific people in a specific moment, which is much harder and much more valuable.

The book holds because it does not separate struggle from flesh. Too many political accounts end up speaking of rights as if they appeared through natural ripening, like fruit on a civilised branch. That is not how it works. Someone goes out into the street. Someone holds the gaze. Someone shouts. Someone gets hit. Someone decides they have had enough of living in a lowered voice. Later come the laws, the narratives, the forewords, and the catalogues. Before that, always, there is the body.

Colita had that rare virtue: she knew Barcelona was not a sentimental backdrop, but a surface of friction. In Nosaltres no tenim por, nosaltres som, La Rambla is neither postcard nor urban myth. It is an occupied place. The street weighs. The façades weigh. The crowd weighs. And in the middle of it all, each face keeps a kind of stubborn fragility, as if pride and fear were not opposites but temporary companions.

Documentary photography can easily fall into two traps: the coldness of the archive or the sentimentality of the noble cause. This book escapes both well enough because Colita looks closely, but does not caress. She does not need to explain that this mattered. She leaves it visible. Importance does not come from an adjective. It comes from a gesture held too long in front of a country that had not yet learned to look without punishing.

This volume is not here to reassure anyone. It is here to remind us that many freedoms began as a public nuisance. An interruption. A crowd that decided existing in private was no longer enough.

You can buy this book here with 5% discount and free shipment.

Moscow · Yashica Mat 124G · Absurd World

This photograph first appeared as a black mass against the sky. A heavy, almost mute figure standing among trees, clouds and distant chimneys. Public grandeur, nature and industry shared the same frame with the usual lack of subtlety that monuments and cities seem to enjoy.

The original scan had force. Darkness turned the statue into an apparition. It also made the image too closed. The figure swallowed the stone, the pedestal and much of the scene around it. The photograph kept its mystery, but lost its body.

The first pass in Lightroom Classic opened the image. Texture returned to the monument. The base separated from the ground. The figure gained matter again. That created a different risk: too much recovery would make the photograph too readable. This image needed to keep dragging part of its original darkness behind it.

The final version stays in that uneasy place. The statue is no longer just a black shape, yet it has not fully escaped the shadow. The sky keeps its weight. The trees still interfere with the outline. The chimneys in the distance, small and stubborn, cut through any heroic reading of the scene. The monument seems aimed at grandeur; the world around it points to something less noble, more ambiguous and much more real.

The photograph belongs to Absurd World because of that collision. A solemn statue under a sky that feels almost theatrical. Trees eating into its shape. Industrial chimneys appearing in the background like a prosaic footnote in a scene trying to act elevated. The monument wants the centre. The rest of the world refuses to behave. Reality has always been good at ruining speeches.

The edit was never about saving a dark photograph. The decision was narrower and more useful: how much shadow the image should keep. The first version had truth, with too little information. The middle version brought back detail, but weakened the tension. The final image lets the statue return from the dark without granting it a clean exit.

Editing, here, meant deciding which part of the shadow still belonged to the photograph.

More Absurd World here.

I am not much in favour of cropping as a habit. If an image comes back from the street needing too much surgery, maybe I did not really see it when I had the chance. But some files carry a clearer photograph inside them. This was one of those.

The image was made with the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome. The original file already had enough material: hard light, weighted shadows, three active faces and a tonal range flexible enough to work with. The problem was the excess around it. Too much park, too much margin, too much information at the edges. Everything was happening inside the frame, but nothing was being forced strongly enough into view.

The crop was the main decision. Not to make the photograph more “correct”, that sad little word when applied to photography, but to bring the bodies closer together and tighten the relationship between them. The bench was already giving the frame a useful diagonal, but in the original it was too dissolved into the scene. Once the frame was tightened, that line began to organize the image: it holds the three figures, separates the planes and stops the eye from escaping too quickly into the background.

The right edge needed care. The woman sits very close to the limit of the frame, and that cut could easily have slipped into error. I left just enough air for the frame to press on her without pushing her out. With more space, the photograph lost tension. With less, the cut became too visible.

I also corrected the tilt slightly. I was not looking for immaculate geometry. In street photography, too much perfection can leave everything a bit dead, like a staged scene designed to sell municipal benches. I only wanted the frame to stop distracting, so the tension came from the bodies rather than from an accidental slant.

The upper part of the background was too noisy. Leaves, façades, patches of sun and small figures were competing with the faces. I used a very soft linear mask from the top, lowering exposure, highlights and whites a little. I did not want to darken the park or manufacture drama. I just wanted the background to speak more quietly.

The white areas needed separate treatment. The pale clothing of the woman in the centre and the bag on the right pulled the eye too strongly. I controlled them locally, without killing them completely. The light still had to remain hard, because that hardness belongs to the photograph. What could not happen was for a white bag to take command over a face.

The overall contrast went up, but not as a show of force. The blacks needed to give structure to the bench, the bags, the trousers and the shadows on the ground. The midtones had to keep skin, fabric and texture. When the grey becomes too clean, the image turns polite. This scene was not asking for politeness.

The final grain is not decoration. It roughens the surface a little and removes that digital cleanliness that often makes photographs look finished before they have even started. With this file from the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, the grain holds well: it gives body to the flat areas and follows the dry light without becoming the subject.

Here the crop does not rescue a weak photograph. It concentrates it. It removes air, lowers the background, controls the whites and lets the three faces do the work. The open version showed a park scene. The final version is tighter, rougher and harder to avoid.

More Urban Wildlife here.

He turns back for a second, caught between the bike and the road. Not a pose. More like he heard the city say his name, which is probably giving the city too much credit.

The photograph would lose something if it were cleaner. The cars, the sign, the glare on the helmet, the bicycle cutting into the body: all that noise keeps him in the street. It stops the portrait from behaving.

I like that the light is not kind. It hits the helmet, hardens the face, leaves the background busy. He looks back, but nothing else stops for him.

Ricoh GR IV Monochrome · Lightroom Classic

More portraits here.

Museums teach a special kind of obedience.

People enter and lower their voices. Marble does that. Painted ceilings help. So do guards, ropes, labels and the quiet pressure of everyone else pretending to know how to stand in front of history.

In the center of the room, a classical body twists in stone. Muscle, drama, old violence polished into culture. It carries the kind of authority that comes from having survived centuries of dust, restoration, school groups and catalogues.

Then the guide raises a tablet.

The movement is small. A few heads turn. A few eyes leave the statue. The glowing rectangle gathers the room without asking for permission. The marble keeps its pose. The screen gets the pulse.

This is Urban Wildlife in formal clothes.

The museum becomes a habitat with rules. Visitors move through it by instinct and training: pause here, look there, follow the voice, keep close to the group, show interest, shift weight from one tired foot to the other. Culture has its choreography. The body learns it quickly.

The ultra-wide lens lets the room crowd itself. Walls lean in. Paintings watch from above. Frames, doors, busts and faces compete for space. The statue bends into the frame while the guide leans forward, tablet raised like evidence. At the edges, people hover between attention and disappearance.

Everything in the image is looking for a place to stand.

The old body holds the center.
The new image steals the glance.
The guide translates.
The visitors drift, gather, wait.

A museum promises order, but the photograph catches the animal movement underneath: the herd around the object, the pull of the screen, the learned patience of people who came to look and still need to be shown where.

Urban wildlife can happen under painted ceilings. It can wear glasses, carry a bag and stand politely beside a statue while a battery-powered image takes over the room.

More Urban Wildlife here.

Technical: Leica M10 Monochrom · Atoll Ultra-Wide 17mm f/2.8

Nobody here is escaping anything. They have just found shade.

The frame starts with a man sitting at a café table, sleeveless, phone in hand, legs crossed with the loose arrogance of someone who has stopped moving because the city has become too hot to negotiate. He looks straight at the camera. Not surprised. Not offended. Just there. That is usually worse.

Behind him, the glass does what glass does in cities: it refuses to be only one thing. Interior, reflection, street, signage, bottles, a Wi-Fi sticker, a clock, a few ghosts of movement. The window turns the background into a small administrative disaster. Everything overlaps. Nothing quite admits responsibility.

On the right, the scene opens into another terrace, another pocket of shade, another set of bodies waiting out the day. Chairs, tables, beer napkin holders, stone, pavement, a strip of hard light at the edge. The city has arranged its traps politely. Sit here. Drink this. Check your phone. Pretend this is leisure.

This is where Urban Wildlife works best: not when people look exotic, but when they look adapted. The café becomes habitat. The plastic chair becomes a perch. The table becomes territory. The phone becomes a feeding device. A person alone in public is rarely alone now; there is always a small screen glowing somewhere, doing its ridiculous little séance.

The before image keeps the scene more buried. It has the density of a day that has not been fully admitted yet. The edit does not make the photograph cleaner. It makes the heat more legible. The pavement comes up. The chairs separate. The wall gets its scratches back. The glass grows more nervous. The man’s stare lands harder.

That matters. A bad edit can turn street photography into decoration, which is a polite form of murder. Too much polish and the street becomes furniture. Too much drama and everyone looks like they wandered into a student film about alienation. Here the edit has one job: to let the scene breathe without washing the dirt off its face.

The photograph is not dramatic. That is its small cruelty. It shows the ordinary arrangement of urban life: bodies placed in available shade, commerce pretending to be hospitality, sunlight waiting to punish anyone who steps too far right.

A man looks up from his phone.

The city looks back.

Technical: Nobody here is escaping anything. They have just found shade.

Technical: Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.

More in Urban Wildlife.

A woman stands in the sea with a phone in her hand. The dog has already decided the scene is over.

There is something useful about beaches when they stop pretending to be peaceful. The water keeps moving, the light chews through everything, and people perform small acts of seriousness in their swimwear. Here, the phone enters the sea like a tiny office that refused to drown. The black dog cuts across the foreground, impatient and correct.

Nobody is posing properly. Good.

More Coast frames here.

A 21mm is not a cautious choice for a bust portrait. Maybe that is why it interested me.

With a wide-angle lens, distance becomes a delicate decision. A little too far and the portrait loses body. A little too close and the face starts paying the price: the nose moves forward, the edges stretch, the proportions become suspicious. Suddenly you are no longer looking at a person, you are watching a lens do things. And few things are duller than a photograph that says, in catalogue voice: look how interesting this lens is.

That was the risk here. Using the Typoch Ksana 1:21/3.5 ASPH as a gimmick. But I did not want to test an optic. I wanted to see what happened if I let the space become part of the portrait too.

The photograph was made with the Leica M10 Monochrom and this Typoch Ksana, a lens that has got under my skin very quickly. It has a way of opening the scene without making it obedient. It does not flatten the world just to make it comfortable. It gives you air, yes, but it also forces you to decide what to do with all that air. With a longer lens, I could have made a cleaner portrait. The background would have been more compressed, the face more separated, the image more correct. It would also have lost much of what makes me keep looking at it.

The portrait works because the man is not isolated. The leather bench, the blown-out window, the reflections, the vertical lines behind him and that hard light coming in with no manners at all are part of his presence. They are not decoration. They do not create atmosphere. They press.

With a 21mm, the place does not stay in the background waiting its turn. It enters the conversation. The bench stretches out to the sides, the seams draw a kind of dark map, the glass dirties the scene, and the window leaves half the world outside through too much light. The man sits at the centre of that tension, but not as a heroic figure. More like someone bearing the weight of the place without quite granting anything to the camera.

That is what I like. The closeness is not gentle, but it is not violent either. The face keeps its proportion. The gaze remains steady, slightly guarded. The shoulders and hands carry more weight than they would with a longer focal length. There is physical presence. This is not just a face cut out with good contrast, that small religion of the well-behaved portrait. It is a person seated in a specific space, under specific light, in a moment that does not seem to have been arranged to please anyone.

The Leica M10 Monochrom helps a great deal in that reading. Black and white does not appear here as an automatic layer of prestige, another minor epidemic in photography. It removes distractions and lets the matter hold: the wool of the sweater, the leather of the seat, the skin of the face, the glass, the reflections, the grain. Everything has a slightly rough texture. The image is not beautiful in the easy sense. It is denser. Drier. More present.

I am also interested in the way the Typoch Ksana holds the balance between closeness and context. It does not make that flattering portrait that separates the person from the world and places a little bubble around them. There is no bubble here. There is seat, window, light, reflection, noise. There are too many things, as there almost always are before a photograph decides whether it is worth anything or not.

That is why I used a wide-angle lens for a bust portrait. Not to correct the rule, and not to act original, that exhausting human pastime. I used it because this portrait needed place. It needed the person and the space not to be separated by an elegant distance. It needed a little friction.

I like the result because it is not entirely clean. It does not try to soften the scene or turn the sitter into a pleasant figure. Nor does it push him into caricature. It stays in a difficult place: too close to be comfortable, far enough not to distort him, wide enough for the place to keep speaking.

A 21mm in a bust portrait can be a bad idea. Here, precisely, that bad idea holds the photograph together.

More portraits here.

The street looked half-dressed this week.

Ten photographs survived the edit: hard light, worn pavements, badly arranged bodies, small civic failures, dogs that understood too much, and faces that did not soften for the camera.

This second StreetSoul video is not a ranking. It is an edit: what enters, what almost enters, and what gets removed because the sequence matters more than the individual photograph.

Provoke does not need clean answers. It needs friction, rough edges, awkward timing, and the kind of public light that makes everything slightly worse and more honest.

A week of hard light, worn pavements, and small scenes that were already crooked. These ten photographs are not the week’s kindest. Good. Provoke is not about fixing the street so it looks presentable, but about looking at it while its shirt is still buttoned wrong.

Provoke Archive here.