If your first thought was that I should crop some of it away, I can see why. The man is over on the right, almost everything seems to happen around him, and the left side looks rather underemployed. But every time I look at this photograph, I want to keep that space.
He’s lighting a cigarette. His head drops towards his hands, his arms close around the gesture, and for a moment there’s this little knot of concentration. That’s where I look first. He doesn’t need to be in the middle to hold my attention. The face and hands are already doing quite enough.
The thirds grid helps, up to a point. The man sits around the right vertical; the bottle and ashtray are closer to the left one. Nothing lines up with mathematical precision. Fine by me. I use the grid to see the distribution more clearly, and I get suspicious when it starts being offered as proof that a photograph works. Plenty of dull photographs obey the rules impeccably.
What matters more here, I think, is the triangle. One corner is down by the ashtray and bottle, another is up at the mask, and the third is towards the lower right, at the outer limit of the man’s body. It’s a broad shape that gathers much of the action into one area. The diagonal from the ashtray to the mask runs through the man’s head; the base returns across the lower part of the scene. His face sits within that arrangement. It isn’t one of the three corners.
The bottle does a fair bit of work, too. It’s dark, quite solid, easy to pick out against the wall. With the ashtray, it gives my eye somewhere to go on the left before returning to the hands. Take those objects away and the balance would be much harder to hold. A small thing can carry a surprising amount of weight in a photograph.
And then there’s the wall. Still there, taking up all that room.
For me, that emptiness gives him a certain solitude. There’s space beside him that nobody fills, while he’s absorbed in this very small task. I’m talking about how the picture feels. I have no idea whether he felt lonely. He may have been perfectly happy and mildly annoyed with his lighter. Photographers are very good at finding existential crises in people who just want a smoke.
A closer crop would give us more of the man and less of that odd distance around him. It might make a stronger immediate impression. I’d miss the slower part: looking at him, wandering across the table, feeling how much room is left over.
The mask complicates things nicely. I notice his mouth almost hidden by his hands, then that other mouth wide open above him. It’s a ridiculous little pairing. He’s busy with his cigarette; the figure behind him seems to be taking the whole business very badly.
There is a trace of Absurd World here, but I would not file it twice. The man carries the photograph. The absurd part arrives later, over his shoulder, disguised as a backpack with a face.
He looks straight at the camera. Cigarette against his chest, watch, rings, no attempt to disappear. That is where the picture holds. Then you notice the cartoon face behind him and the frame shifts slightly. Not into a joke. Just somewhere stranger.
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.
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.
Sant Joan does not need more spectacle. It already has enough.
What interested me was the pressure around it: bodies packed into narrow streets, hands looking for balance, the animal becoming public weather, the crowd pretending it can control what it has summoned.
The horse is not always the subject. Sometimes the subject is the space it removes from everyone else. The bent neck, the raised legs, the hands against the wall, the phone too close, the face half-hidden by heat and noise. The ritual holds because it nearly stops holding. That edge is where these photographs sit.
Ciutadella gives the event a beautiful frame. These photographs do not obey that frame for long. They stay closer to the crush, the sweat, the uniform, the balcony, the interior rooms before the street swallows everything again.
Black and white strips away the festive explanation and leaves weight: skin, stone, cloth, shadow, animal muscle, public fatigue.
This is not a guide to Sant Joan.
It is a first edit from inside the pressure.
Technical note: Sant Joan de Ciutadella, 2026. Black and white street photography. Leica M10 Monochrom / Ricoh GR IV Monochrome · Lightroom Classic.
Original shot by StreetSoul with my loved Ricoh GR IV Monochrome and Lightroom Classic.
Review of Disparos contados, by Leila Méndez
The finger arrives too soon.
That is the problem, or at least one of the problems. Digital photography did not invent haste, but it gave it batteries, a screen, cheap memory, and a very convenient technical excuse. Shoot now. Think later. The phrase sounds practical until one day you open the archive and find hundreds of correct, polite, sharp, perfectly dead images. A cemetery can also be well focused.
Disparos contados, by Leila Méndez, enters through this crack. Not through the solemn door of analogue nostalgia, with its smell of darkroom, leather straps, and people talking about “process” as if they had discovered wet fire. The book looks at something smaller and more useful: restraint. The pause before the click. The discomfort of knowing that not everything deserves to be photographed just because it can be photographed.
Its strongest idea is not to defend film against the sensor. That war has already produced enough dull conversations on terraces, forums, and dinners where someone always ends up saying “texture” with worrying gravity. Méndez points toward an attitude. Photograph with fewer automatisms. Accept a little friction. Let the image take longer to arrive, even if that delay looks bad in any productivity metric.
In the excerpt published by Anagrama, there is a perfect scene for understanding the book: a concert photographer who loaded his roll of film at the beginning, spent most of the concert watching, and only took three photographs at the end, at the moment of highest intensity. Three. Not one more. The restriction did not make him better by magic, but it forced him to wait for something. And waiting, in photography, is already almost a form of thought.
This is where the book gains weight. Analogue photography does not appear as a superior purity. Méndez herself warns that the chemical format does not improve or elevate any artistic discourse by itself. Good news: film does not redeem mediocrity either. An empty photograph remains empty, even if it has grain and cost twelve euros to develop. Grain can hide many things, but it does not perform miracles. No point asking it to do saintly work.
What analogue does offer, when it does not turn into theatre, is a useful kind of poverty. Few exposures. Cost. Delay. Uncertainty. A chain of small irritations that force you to decide before producing. Digital, by contrast, has trained us to produce before deciding. We will choose later. We will edit later. We will see later. That “later” piles up on hard drives full of images that do not ask to be looked at, only archived with a moderate sense of guilt.
For StreetSoul, the book touches a familiar nerve. Street photography has always lived too close to hunting. A body crosses a shadow, a hand slips out of a shop window, a face is cut by a reflection, the traffic light stages a little involuntary theatre. The finger wants to shoot. The street does not wait. But haste is not always instinct. Often it is only the fear of going home without prey.
Méndez is not asking us to go backwards. That saves the book from a very easy fall. In photography, the past usually has too many defenders with display cabinets. The interesting question is not whether we should return to film, but what we can learn from that imposed slowness. What happens if a digital camera is used with a less greedy discipline. What changes if the photographer accepts not shooting. Not out of Zen posturing, that other plague with good natural light, but out of respect for the image.
Immediacy has turned many photographers into administrators of their own noise. Go out, shoot, import, select, edit, export, publish, tag, measure, repeat. A flawless chain. Also a slightly idiotic one. Photography ends up working shifts to feed platforms that confuse presence with meaning. The world was already saturated enough before every shadow had to book an appointment with Instagram.
Disparos contados matters when it defends a simple idea without turning it into doctrine: limits can sharpen the eye. They guarantee nothing. They do not make anyone a better photographer. They only remove excuses. With fewer shots, each shot weighs more. With less abundance, the decision stands more exposed. And when the decision is poor, it can no longer hide behind a burst.
The book should also be read against another superstition: the belief that an analogue attitude carries some kind of moral nobility. It does not. It can mean judgement, patience, waiting. It can also mean vanity with developing receipts. The format is not what makes the difference. The eye does. A digital Leica can be as lazy as a plastic compact. A roll of film can contain thirty-six expensive mistakes. Chemistry does not think for anyone.
The book’s value sits in this uncomfortable zone: it does not sell a solution, it points to a vice. We shoot too much because we can. We look too little because looking does not immediately produce anything. Photography, when it still keeps a little dignity, begins just before the click. In that small second when the finger shuts up and the mind, if it gets there in time, decides.
The problem is not coming home with few photographs. The problem is coming home with a thousand and discovering that none of them had been waited for.
You can buy this book here with 5% discount and free shipping.
Times Square is basically a factory that mass-produces attention. So when someone sits down right in the middle of it calm, amused, smoking like the chaos is background music, it feels almost rude (in the best way).
My main decision was to simplify the noise: I framed her against the shipping container so the scene has one big, blunt shape instead of a thousand tiny distractions. The container becomes a deadpan backdrop, and the “TIMES SQUARE” bins do the unglamorous job of pinning the place and adding a little irony: the world’s loudest square, reduced to municipal typography.
I waited for that half-smile and hand-to-mouth gesture (something between “caught” and “I don’t care”). The passersby on the right stay as proof that this is public theatre, and most people are walking past the best scene.
