Tag: dailyprompt

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.

See more here.

Daily writing prompt

Who are some underrated people in history?

View all responses

History often reads like a contact sheet edited by cowards.

A few faces are circled in red. The rest are left on the table: blurred, inconvenient, badly timed, not respectable enough, not male enough, not white enough, not easy enough to print. Ask who is underrated in history and the answer is not a clean ranking. It is a drawer full of people who did the work while someone else got the frame.

Claudette Colvin was fifteen when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery in 1955, months before Rosa Parks became the name most people remember. Colvin was not a footnote; she later became one of the plaintiffs in the case that helped end bus segregation in Montgomery. But history prefers a neat portrait. Teenagers, anger, poverty, complexity — these things make the picture harder to hang.

Alice Ball was twenty-three when she developed a workable treatment for leprosy using chaulmoogra oil, before antibiotics changed the field. She died young. Other people had more time to stand near her work and look important. Chemistry is not photogenic, especially when the chemist is a young Black woman in early-twentieth-century Hawaiʻi. So the room goes quiet, and the discovery keeps working without applause.

Bayard Rustin helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and advised Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolent resistance. He also lived openly as a gay man in a movement and a country that punished him for it, which helped push him into the background. The crowd gets remembered. The man who helped build the conditions for the crowd is easier to crop out.

Noor Inayat Khan was a British resistance agent in Nazi-occupied France. For several months in 1943, she was the only British intelligence agent operating in the Paris area, sending wireless messages to London. Captured, imprisoned, and executed at Dachau, she did not give up Allied secrets. Her story does not need embroidery. The facts are already dark enough.

Mary Anning spent her life pulling fossils from the cliffs of Lyme Regis, doing work that helped shape modern science while respectable men owned most of the rooms where science was allowed to speak. The Natural History Museum describes her as a pioneering palaeontologist whose contributions remained relatively unknown until recently. There is something almost comic about that sentence. She found ancient animals. The present took nearly two centuries to find her.

Chien-Shiung Wu led the experiment that overturned the supposed conservation of parity in beta decay. The Nobel Prize went to the theorists Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. Wu’s name remained attached to the experiment, which is polite; the prize remained unattached to her, which is the usual paperwork of power.

Maybe “underrated” is too soft a word. It sounds like a restaurant review. These people were not merely underrated. They were delayed, thinned, cleaned up, misplaced, or pushed behind a better-lit figure.

History has always loved a central subject. Street photography teaches the opposite: sometimes the truth is the person half-cut by the edge of the frame, the one almost missed, the one who did not turn toward the camera.

The archive is not finished. It just pretends to be.

More Provoke work here.

Daily writing prompt

Which is the best thing to do in your city?

View all responses

People ask what the best thing to do in a city is, as if a city were a hotel breakfast with a laminated menu.

In mine, the best thing is to walk until the official city loses interest in you.

Forget the obedient circuit: square, church, museum, queue, ice cream, ticket, tiny photograph proving you were alive for six minutes. That kind of tourism has the emotional depth of a parking ticket. The city is not there. The city is where the pavement heats up, where the fountain talks to itself, where the trees rise in a dark line like undertakers waiting for the next public ceremony.

Then someone passes by on a skateboard, shirtless, cap pulled low, carrying the whole afternoon on his shoulders.

Nothing dramatic happens. That is the point.

The skateboard goes rrrrr. The water spits. A shadow stretches across the slabs with more elegance than most elected officials will manage in an entire lifetime. The scene lasts less than a second and refuses to explain itself. Perfect. Explanations are where mediocre photographs go to die.

I like the parts of the city that have not yet been fully tamed. The edge of a square. The side of a fountain. Bored young people. The man smoking with the face of a defeated empire. The dog that has understood traffic better than its owner. The places where people do not pose and, precisely because of that, reveal more than they would like.

A city is not honest when it shows you its monuments. It is honest when it is busy doing something else.

Go out when the light is rude. Stand in the wrong place. Wait. Let the city drag its small ordinary miracles in front of you: a skater, a fountain, a bad haircut, a nervous laugh, a leaf of shadow cutting the pavement in half.

You do not need a plan. Plans are what people invent when they are afraid to look.

The best thing you can do in your city is waste time properly.

Daily writing prompt

What super power do you wish you had and why?

View all responses

I wouldn’t ask for flying. I’ve seen enough people looking down from balconies, offices and pulpits to know that height rarely improves anyone. It mostly gives stupidity a better view.

Invisibility is tempting, but it feels redundant. Most people have already mastered disappearing behind manners, job titles, passwords, perfume and that little social smile that says absolutely nothing and gets invited everywhere.

No. I’d want the power to make false words lose their teeth.

Put me in front of a slogan, a promise, a campaign, an apology, a patriotic speech, a spiritual brochure, any of those polished little lies humans frame and hang on the wall, and I’d make it open its mouth. If there is truth inside, let it breathe. If there isn’t, let everyone see the gums.

Peace should not need bulbs, boards, sermons or a mouth big enough to bite the room. Real peace can stand in the dark without advertising itself. Fake peace usually comes with typography.

That would be my superpower: not saving the world, because the world has shown an impressive talent for resisting rescue, but making fraud visible. A modest miracle. Almost practical, which is why nobody would fund it.

More Provoke frames here.

Daily writing prompt

What gives you direction in life?

View all responses

What gives me direction in life?

Not a five-year plan. Not a motivational quote printed over a fake mountain. Not some clean little compass sold by people who say “mindset” with the solemnity of undertakers. Direction, in my case, comes from walking until reality trips over itself and accidentally tells the truth.

Here, for example, a woman passes through the frame as if she has just remembered she is late for her own life. She is blurred, half-present, already leaving. Behind her, on the wall, someone has written the kind of sentence that sounds stupid until you realise it is probably the most accurate theology available in the neighbourhood: “Life is trolling. Make it sweet.”

Beside the words, an old painted man with a walker points nowhere in particular. A prophet, naturally. Not one of those expensive prophets with a podcast and white teeth, but the better kind: thin, black, badly sprayed, anonymous, and nailed to a wall on a street corner. His message is not “follow your dreams.” His message is: you will slow down, you will need support, the pavement will remain indifferent, and still you may as well keep moving.

That gives me direction.

The city does not explain itself. It drops clues. A shadow. A gesture. A woman turning her face. A bin placed exactly where dignity goes to retire. A sentence written by someone who may have been drunk, lucid, desperate, or all three, which is often the same artistic department with different office hours.

I do not trust grand answers. Grand answers are usually furniture for empty rooms. I trust friction. I trust the small humiliations of the street. The unexpected joke. The bad wall. The passing body. The fact that everything serious eventually has to share space with rubbish bags, scooters, delivery vans, chewing gum, and someone shouting into a phone as if history were customer service.

Direction is not certainty. Certainty is for GPS devices and fanatics, two species that speak too confidently and recalculate badly. Direction is a bias toward attention. It is choosing to look again when the world seems already used up. It is admitting that the scene in front of you, ugly and accidental, may know more than your tidy opinions.

Photography helps because it refuses to let life become entirely abstract. You can have principles, ideas, ambitions, a whole private parliament of noble excuses. Then the street interrupts: a face cuts across the frame, the wall laughs at you, the light collapses, and suddenly everything you thought was important has to prove itself at 1/500 of a second.

That is a useful cruelty.

Hope is fine, but it has been overmarketed. I prefer appetite. The appetite to keep noticing. To keep walking. To keep finding sweetness in the troll, because bitterness is too obedient. Bitterness does exactly what the world expects of a person who has been paying attention. Sweetness, when it is honest, is more insulting. It says: I saw the mess. I understood the joke. I am still here.

So no, I do not have a luminous path. I have corners. Walls. Blurred strangers. Accidents. Bad advice that turns out to be good. A camera. A pair of tired eyes. The suspicion that the next street may be slightly less dead than the last one.

That is enough direction for one life. More would probably become branding.

More Urban Wildlife here.

Daily writing prompt

What are your favorite emojis?

View all responses

My favorite emoji is probably the one I don’t use.

Emojis are useful, yes, in the same way plastic cutlery is useful: quick, clean, disposable, and slightly depressing if you think about it for more than seven seconds. They arrive already emotionally assembled. A tiny yellow face tells the world what you are supposed to feel before you have had the decency to feel it properly.

The problem is not the emoji. The problem is the abuse. A sentence followed by seven little faces begins to look less like communication and more like a hostage note from a phone keyboard. Joy, sadness, irony, tenderness, embarrassment: all flattened into a municipal catalogue of approved reactions. Human beings spent centuries inventing literature, painting, photography, music, silence, the raised eyebrow, and then decided that a winking yellow circle would do the job. Sensible species, obviously.

So, no, I don’t have a sacred top ten. I can tolerate a few. The skull, because at least it admits everything is ridiculous. The black heart, because it has the courtesy not to pretend. The camera, naturally, because some clichés pay rent. But my favorite remains absence: the blank space where the emoji could have been, forcing the sentence to stand on its own two miserable legs.

This photograph says it better than I can. Sunglasses, cigarette, phone, menu behind me, the face of a man apparently being held against his will by modern communication. No emoji required. The expression is already doing the dirty work.

More portraits here.

Daily writing prompt

What makes you nervous?

View all responses

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.