StreetSoul

Category: Street Photography

  • Waiting Room: Introducing StreetSoul Zine

    Waiting Room: Introducing StreetSoul Zine

    Black and white image of a woman posing with her arms raised, looking up, in front of a colorful carnival backdrop with game booths and decorations. The title 'Waiting Room' and subtitle 'StreetSoul Zine #001 September 2026' are overlaid at the bottom.

    StreetSoul Zine #001 · September 2026

    Waiting has a way of making people visible. A man sits with a cigarette. Another reads beside the water. A child takes up most of a bench; a few pages later, the bench is empty. The street carries on around them. It has other appointments.

    These photographs make up Waiting Room, the first issue of StreetSoul Zine. It is a sixteen-page digital zine of black-and-white street photography, held together by one idea. Waiting can look like rest, boredom, distraction, or a few minutes nobody knows what to do with. I do not know what each person was waiting for. The photographs have no need to settle the question.

    I wanted to see what happens when the pictures sit together. One face changes how we look at the next empty seat. A small gesture can carry over to a photograph made somewhere else. The pause between pages has its own part to play. It is a modest format, but there is room in it to slow down and notice what a single post can lose.

    That is how StreetSoul Zine will work: each issue will follow a different thread through the photographs. Starting today, followers of this site and the StreetSoul WhatsApp channel will receive it. If all goes to plan, I will publish a new issue every Sunday.

  • Before Everything Is Done

    How do you make time for self-care?

    View all responses

    I’m not very good at making time for myself.

    I’ll go out once I’ve answered this. Once I’ve finished that. There’s always one more small thing, and I keep believing it will only take five minutes. Then I look at the time.

    So, usually, making time for myself means closing the computer with something still pending. I find that surprisingly difficult. I can spend far too long deciding whether I can spare half an hour. Long enough that I could have gone out and come back.

    Taking the camera helps. It gives me a reason to leave, although I’m slightly annoyed that I seem to need one. Nobody expects you to justify going out for bread. Going out to look at things feels harder to explain. Mostly to myself, I should say. Nobody is actually standing at the door demanding an itinerary.

    Once I’m outside, I start noticing things. Someone lingering in a doorway, a reflection, two people apparently having very different afternoons. Most of it never becomes a photograph. I’m too slow, or the background is a mess, or it turns out there wasn’t much there in the first place. I still like looking.

    It doesn’t work every time. Sometimes I’m three streets away and still having the same tedious argument in my head. But then something catches my attention and, for a bit, I lose my place in it. That’s a relief.

    The awkward part is what I do afterwards. I want to see the photographs. Fair enough. Then I want to edit one, find a title, decide where it belongs, put it on the website, prepare the posts. Suddenly there’s a list again. I’ve managed to give a walk an administration department.

    I enjoy that work too, which complicates things. I don’t always notice when I’ve stopped enjoying it and started trying to get through it.

    I’m trying to get better at leaving a photograph unedited for a while. Letting a message wait. Taking whatever time is available without first clearing enough space for some ideal, uninterrupted afternoon. Twenty minutes will do. On some days I remember this early enough to use them.

    And I’d like to come home without immediately checking whether I got anything worth keeping. I’m less good at that. The camera is right there.

    For now, I’m still beside a wall, waiting for someone to walk into the light. Someone does, and I’m too slow. I mutter something and stay a little longer.

    Mixed Reviews — Small Dramas
    Leica M10 Monochrom · Elmarit-M 28mm f/2.8 ASPH.

  • Already in Motion

    Already in Motion

    The best thing I’ve ever found randomly on the street wasn’t money or some forgotten treasure. It was a story that had already begun without me.

    A boy tore across the square, toy gun in hand, somewhere between a chase and an escape. I had no idea who the enemy was, or what rule I had just broken by walking into the scene. For a fraction of a second, he looked at me. Click.

    The street rarely explains itself. Thankfully. If it did, half of photography would be paperwork.

  • Three Times the Same Stranger

    Three Times the Same Stranger

    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.

  • Feeding Time

    Feeding Time

    A horse eats from a bucket. The pigeons close in. People pass, wait, work, disappear into the background.

    Nothing dramatic. Just the city dividing up a few square metres of pavement according to rules nobody wrote down.

    The horse gets fed. The pigeons steal what they can. The humans keep moving.

    Leica M10 Monochrom · Elmarit-M 28mm f/2.8 ASPH.

    From series Urban Wildlife.

  • Liberty Takes Quarters

    Liberty Takes Quarters

    On Liberty Island, three coin-operated viewers stand in line before a horizon that was already free.

    The nearest one has all the authority: metal face, twin eyes and a small order stamped across its mouth: QUARTERS ONLY. Then a seagull crosses the frame without paying, without focusing and apparently without feeling any need to improve the view.

    The 17mm exaggerates the distance between the machines and turns the closest one into something halfway between street furniture and a minor government official. The bird arrived late and saved the photograph. Without it, this might have been a very tidy architectural exercise. A terrible fate.

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

    More Absurd World here.

    Before and after editing.
  • Soft Target

    Soft Target

    Fairground stalls do not leave much room for looking properly. Lights, stuffed prizes, rows of white targets, people drifting in and out. Too much of everything.

    What held me was the arm.

    The woman on the left had Strong tattooed under a small cactus. A detail almost too convenient, honestly. The kind of thing that can hijack a photograph if you let it. But the gesture beside it was better: her arm around the other woman, the phone dangling behind her back as if she had forgotten it was there.

    I left the man on the left and the child on the right. They crowd the frame and make it slightly harder to read. That helped. Without them, the image becomes cleaner, more private and probably weaker. The 21mm kept everyone inside the same mess: lights, prizes, targets, bodies, waiting.

    The top of the stall is close to blowing out. The lower half nearly disappears into hair and black clothes. I could have fixed that a little. I did not. The imbalance felt right.

    The tattoo gave me the easy title. I went elsewhere. Soft Target felt less tidy, which was the point. Strength on the skin, a quiet gesture, all those targets behind them.

    Technical: Leica M10 Monochrom · Thypoch Ksana 21mm f/3.5 Asph.

    Before and after editing.
  • Plastic Karma

    Plastic Karma

    Enlightenment arrived by compressor.

    A colossal figure has settled in the middle of an ordinary street. Eyes closed. Palms open. Expression beyond complaint. Behind it: tired render, garage doors, utility boxes, a streetlamp and wires crossing the sky with the usual civic indifference.

    The figure offers serenity, but the seams are visible. So are the cords. Transcendence, apparently, requires anchoring points.

    This is where Plastic Karma begins: not with plastic as rubbish, but with plastic as belief. A temporary deity, light enough to be folded, transported and stored after use. The sacred has become inflatable—not destroyed, merely made practical. There is probably a compressor somewhere outside the frame doing the real spiritual work.

    The ultra-wide view gives the figure nowhere to hide. It fills the street and still belongs to it. The raised hands almost touch the surrounding houses; the elaborate crown rises into the web of cables. Monument and neighbourhood collide without ceremony. One was built to astonish. The other has seen invoices.

    At ground level, a small weighted anchor sits beside the immense body, an undignified detail that improves everything. Every vision needs ballast. Every god needs somebody to stop it rolling down the road.

    The face remains composed.

    Plastic is good at that.The goddess arrived folded.

    By the time I found her, she had taken possession of the street: a vast inflatable woman with closed eyes and open hands, wedged between garage doors, rough plaster and domestic wiring. The houses looked older for having her there. She looked cheaper.

    Her expression has the irritating serenity of things that never have to pay for themselves. The crown rises into the cables. Her elbows nearly touch the walls. Thin ropes hold her body in place, and beside one foot sits a small weight—the practical detail that ruins the miracle and makes the photograph.

    The 17mm lens leaves no room for respectful distance. She swells towards the frame while the street presses back: a lamp, a balcony, corrugated roofing, the number five above a dark doorway. Nothing has been prepared for revelation. Someone has simply inflated it between the usual routines.

    That is the useful tension. The figure is too large to ignore and too obviously temporary to believe in. She may be a goddess, an advertisement, festival decoration, or all three. Faith with a valve. Grandeur delivered by van and packed away before Monday.

    The face keeps its composure. The stitching runs down the cheeks and chin. Air holds everything together.

    For now.More shots in Absurd World.

    Technical: Leica M10 Monochrom · Atoll Ultra-Wide 17mm f2.8.

  • The Game Looked Back

    The Game Looked Back

    Childhood does not always look innocent in public.

    Sometimes it runs across a square with one foot almost off the ground, a small dark object in one hand, and a face that seems to understand the camera before the camera has time to understand the scene. The game is probably harmless. The photograph is not required to be.

    That is where the image sits.

    The square carries on with its usual civic indifference. People sit on benches. Others cross in the background. A tree cuts the frame. The paving stones draw their little grid of public order, because cities enjoy pretending that geometry can manage human behavior. It cannot, obviously. The boy breaks through it with the directness of movement, and the photograph starts to tilt away from documentation into something less comfortable.

    What holds the frame is not the object in the hand, although it charges the image with a bad little current. What holds it is the look. The child is running, but he is not simply passing through the photograph. He turns toward it. For a second, the game looks back.

    That look changes the scene. Without it, the image would be movement: a child crossing a square, a loose street moment, a figure in motion. With it, the square becomes a small stage where play borrows the shape of adult nonsense. Not danger, not drama in the theatrical sense. Something smaller and more irritating. A rehearsal of gestures the world has already made available.

    This is why the photograph belongs to Small Dramas. Not because something spectacular happens, but because the scene carries more pressure than its surface admits. The gesture is minor. The tension is not. The background stays calm, almost bored, which makes the central movement sharper. The adults do not react. The benches do not care. The city, that great specialist in pretending nothing is happening, continues to be itself.

    Black and white helps remove the soft explanations. No color to make the square pleasant. No festive excuse. Just stone, bodies, benches, trees, a running figure, and the uncomfortable little weight of a game that has learned too much from the public world around it.

    The photograph does not accuse the child. That would be cheap, and the world already produces enough cheap accusations before breakfast.

    It looks instead at the scene that made the gesture readable.

    More Absurd World here.

  • Short on my YT channel