Category: Sense categoria

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.

The city came after, burned white and badly behaved.

Shot with the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, close enough for comfort to become useless. The frame is dirty in the right places: wall, glare, scaffolding, parked cars, a hand holding the jacket as if the day might fall out of it.

Provoke is not decoration here. It is pressure. Too much light. Too little distance. A face that does not soften for the camera.

Nothing heroic.
Nothing solved.
Just the street, doing its usual damage.

Provoke Archive here.

Cristina García Rodero reaches rituals before they harden into explanation.

She does not photograph rituals as if they were museum pieces. She gets close to them while they are still sweating.

Her images are full of bodies caught in awkward states: belief, fatigue, laughter, fear, devotion, embarrassment, trance. People kneel, dance, carry saints, stare, hide, push through crowds, lose themselves for a second. Nothing sits still for long. What first looks like tradition soon turns into theatre, then into tension, then into something harder to name.

Diez horas con Cristina García Rodero, published by La Fábrica in its Archivo de Creadores series, is built as a long conversation rather than a conventional photobook. That is a sensible choice. Her photographs do not need someone standing beside them explaining what they mean, like a nervous museum guide. The book works better than that. It lets her talk about time, work, memory and stubbornness: the things that usually stay outside the frame.

García Rodero is often described through large, respectable words: ritual, faith, tradition, popular culture, documentary photography. They are not wrong. They are just a little too clean. Her work is messier than those labels suggest. Spain already had fiestas, processions, masks, animals, saints, coffins, children, old women, smoke and noise. She did not invent that world. She stayed with it long enough for it to stop behaving like folklore.

That patience is the real subject of the book. The conversation shows how much of her photography comes from returning, waiting, watching and accepting discomfort. The strongest images do not feel stolen. They feel earned. García Rodero does not seem interested in the quick prize, the tidy symbol, the obvious gesture. She waits for the moment when the scene slips, when everyone is still inside the ritual but something human leaks through.

The book also helps explain why her photographs hold so much contradiction without needing to resolve it. The sacred is never far from the grotesque. Beauty turns up crooked. Death comes decorated. Faith has sweat on it. Children stand near masks that look older than the village itself. A crowd can protect a body and swallow it at the same time. In weaker hands, this material would become exotic or sentimental. García Rodero keeps it unstable.

That is why her work still speaks to documentary and street photographers. Not because it offers a style to imitate. Imitating García Rodero would be a fine way to produce loud, empty pictures. What matters is the method: stay longer, look harder, distrust the obvious. Attention, in her case, is not politeness. It is pressure. She keeps looking until the scene gives up its first explanation.

The volume is small, but it has weight because it avoids turning her into a monument. That is no small achievement. Photography culture can be terribly good at embalming its own legends while pretending to celebrate them. Here, García Rodero remains active, specific, practical. She talks like someone who has worked, not like someone posing beside her own myth.

This book should be read beside the photographs, not instead of them. The images still need to be faced directly. But the conversation changes the way one returns to them. It makes the work feel less miraculous and more demanding. Not smaller. Better.

García Rodero has spent decades photographing people at the point where ritual stops being decoration. What appears in her pictures is not simply tradition. It is behaviour under strain, belief under heat, bodies trying to hold a form while life keeps pushing through.

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

StreetSoul is now on YouTube.

The first video is a short introduction to the project: black and white street photography, hard light, strange gestures, public tension, failed frames, and the ordinary absurdity of urban life.

No motivational speeches.
No gear worship.
No cinematic sludge.

Just the street, in black and white, behaving badly enough to be useful.