Nobody can live our lives for us. We have to live them ourselves. It’s a responsibility we can’t escape if we really want to live. The alternative, spending whole days watching TikTok or TV, living a proxy life by copying what celebrities do or influencers recommend, or blindly following the social conventions of the crowd, is just a band-aid, an escape from reality, a way of avoiding responsibility for the life you’ve been given. Outsourcing your life might be comfortable, but by doing so you risk becoming an empty shell, an unfulfilled and unhappy being. A hammer that withers away without ever being used can hardly be called a hammer.

If you want to live, really live, you have to answer that quiet call deep down to take your life into your own hands, to put something of yourself into the world and, in doing so, give meaning to your life.

If I draw a parallel with photography, I’d say that a photographer is someone who sets out to create authentic photos, born out of a need to express something uniquely their own and, in doing so, shaping the world and taking their life into their own hands. The queues at certain popular Instagram spots, where thousands of photos end up looking exactly the same, are the opposite of that. Copying what someone else has already done isn’t self-expression. You’re not putting anything of yourself out into the world. You’re simply following in the footsteps of others. It’s not creation, it’s expression by proxy.

In short, an authentic photographer doesn’t follow the way others see the world. They capture images driven by their own individual urge to shape the world and, in doing so, give meaning to their life.

AI doesn’t have a finite life. It doesn’t have a body that makes it fear that one day it will all be over. It has no urge to give meaning to its own existence, to put something of itself into the world. All AI does is generate the most statistically plausible variations on the vast amounts of data it has been fed. Everything it produces is based on what others have already done. It mixes, recombines and mashes things up, but none of it comes from an inner life of its own.

So, IMO, if you’re looking for real, authentic communication (and real, authentic photographs), AI isn’t the place to look. You need other people for that: mortal beings who are forced to open themselves up if they want to make their lives worthwhile.

Try to focus on the shapes, composition and overall balance of the image.

1

2

3

4

5

6

Okay, did you do your homework? Here we go…

One of the two photos in each pair was created by ChatGPT, the other is my original.

Here are the originals:

1. Left

2. Right

3. Right

4. Left

5. Left

6. Right

So, what’s this post about?
Researchers found evidence that our response to abstract art is influenced not only by color, style or personal taste, but also by the way shapes and spaces are arranged within an image. This is where topology, a branch of mathematics that looks at the structure and relationships between forms, comes in. It examines how elements connect, where spaces appear, and which patterns remain visible at different scales.

Using a technique called persistent homology, the researchers analysed abstract artworks by artists including Rothko, Kandinsky and Pollock. They also looked at something called Alexander duality. In simple terms, this describes the relationship between the shapes in an image and the empty spaces around and between them. It helps measure how forms and negative space balance and relate to each other.

The researchers found that the artworks by the famous abstract artists had an Alexander duality value of around 0.4. Their findings suggest that this kind of underlying mathematical structure may be connected to where we naturally direct our attention when looking at art.

That got me wondering: what would happen if I applied the same idea to my own photographs?

The images generated by ChatGPT that I showed you were adjusted to approach this 0.4 value. I asked the AI to rework my original photographs accordingly.

So, which do you prefer: the edited images or the originals? What I learned from the experiment is that I should pay more attention to the balance between lighter and darker areas in my photographs.

Algorithms are not about exploration. Their focus is on gliding you into algorithmic comfort zones. They do not feel like they are exerting control. They often feel like convenience.
We run like rats in a wheel through loop after loop of predictable engagement.

When problems appear, the common response is more control. More filters, more moderation rules, more account restrictions, more automated removal. But this way, behaviour is shaped externally, not internally, not by learning self-control. Social media enforces control from the outside. Instead of building character, systems enforce compliance.

“If there is something dangerous, it is control over children. Young people need to be listened to. Control is ​not a healthy form of presence. The healthiest distance is trust.”

Federico Tonioni, head of the Web Psychopathology Centre at Rome’s Gemelli hospital.

The more systems optimise behaviour through control, the less people practice controlling themselves. We trade internal strength for external management and call it safety.

What can we do?

Control is efficient, but it is shallow. Trust and self-regulation take longer, but they create independence that does not collapse when rules are removed. So we can develop our ability to engage without being fully directed by systems.
That requires character formation.

The focus cannot only be on restricting content or behaviour. It must include strengthening internal awareness and self-shaping your taste. Here’s some material to do just that.

Why do I get those reactions in 99% of cases? It’s as if there’s something wrong with not trying to squeeze as much value as possible out of my work.
I give away my photos as a gift, pure and simple, without expecting anything in return. You don’t owe me anything when you accept them. There’s not even a moral etiquette at play that says receiving my gift creates a moral debt, an obligation to give me something back.

Why do I do it this way? I’ve thought about that.

We’ve come to see ourselves as small businesses in every part of life. It’s one of the defining ideas of our society. It traces back to Adam Smith, an 18th-century Scottish philosopher, often considered the father of modern economics, who described how people in economic exchanges act in their own interest (and how that can still serve the common good).
But what was meant to be the leading principle of economy hasn’t stayed there. The idea has spread into everything. Now, in every interaction, in every exchange with others, we’re expected to maximise our gain. Invite someone over for dinner, and you expect an invitation in return, ideally one that matches or tops your own. Receive a birthday gift, and you feel the need to give something back of equal or slightly higher value. Give a photo to someone, and of course, you should ask for something in return.

But the moment I ask you something in return, I’m bound by an obligation. If I make you pay for my Substack newsletter, I’d have to deliver what you think your money is worth. That would limit my freedom, my ability to do what I want. Photography is my hobby. I want to follow my own path, take on challenges that help me become a better person, develop as a fellow human to others. Not chase followers (or earn money with it, I’m not a pro).

But keeping my freedom is not the main reason.
The deeper point is this: I want to contribute, in a small way, to a world where we don’t constantly keep score. Where we don’t track who owes what, or who invited whom last. Where we don’t have to calculate the value of everything we share, or the value of our interactions with other people. I’d like to live in a world like that.

Anyway, here are some unconditional gifts.

The moments you watched TV? The sunday afternoons with your family? Or are it the afterparties you remember, playing FIFA on Playstation until you fade out?

I had an interesting conversation today, with a guy named Tom. He played with his band in Australia. He organised parties in Gent’s main art museum. He booked Nick Cave. He plays several instruments. He is a light artist. Those are his memories.
He’s 63 now, and he has early dementia.

I was impressed. After all, he told remarkable stories from a life richly lived. But more than anything, I felt a quiet relief: when I look back on my own life, it doesn’t disappoint me. I’m grateful for the memories I carry.

Here are a few more memories in the making.

That act always makes me pause. Do these fleeting tableaux even exist if I’m not there to see them? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, is there sound?

George Berkeley had an answer: things only really exist when they’re perceived. Objects, sounds, smells, … the core of their reality is that they’re ideas in a mind.
A moment isn’t a moment until I notice it and so I become, briefly, a creator of reality with every click.
I am a divine entity.

But before you start worshipping me, I should warn you: not everyone agrees. Aside from my wife and best friends, who make sure my ego doesn’t drift off (every single day), there’s Immanuel Kant. The world exists on its own, he insists. Streets, people, light, shadows, … they’re there whether I see them or not.
I don’t create reality, I step into it. I register it, trace it. The falling tree still stirs the air, even if no one’s around.
Kant has a way of planting my two feet firmly back on the ground.

But I’m a dreamer, so keeping my feet on the ground is never going to happen. And thankfully, there’s Martin Heidegger. He reminds me that I’m not just recording what’s “out there.” I choose where to look, what to frame, what to hold and that’s how a slice of the world becomes visible in a way it might not have been.
Things gain meaning only when we pay attention. Or, in Heidegger’s words (brace yourself) : “Dasein is that being which in its Being has this very Being as an issue.” (If you think that hurts, then try the original version: “Das Dasein ist een Seiendes, dem es in seinem Sein om dieses Sein selbst geht.”)

Photography doesn’t make the world, but it helps others see it. I don’t decide what exists. I decide what stands out, what lingers, what gets noticed. I’m not a creator, so it seems, only an occasional influencer.

My fingers are stiff around my camera.
I wonder, not for the first time tonight, why I’m out here. Walking through mist and salt air while almost everybody else sleeps under thick blankets.
Maybe I’m waiting for something.
Maybe I just like being here when the world feels emptied out.

A figure appears through the fog ahead of me, walking along the sea wall. For a moment he passes through the light of a lamp, his coat pulled tight, shoulders slightly bent against the wind. I click.

Recently I read Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux. At one point she describes how the painter talked about what he called “colour gymnastics”. He believed complementary colours carried a kind of spiritual force, he thought that opposites fulfilled each other, like an ideal form of earthly love.

Reading that, I had a small realisation. I’ve spent years assuming there is a “correct” version of colour somewhere out there, and that I’m seeing a slightly defective edition of it. But Gauguin made me realise there’s no such thing as correctness when it comes to colour. He trusted his own perception, even when it led him to improbable results.

That thought is strangely freeing when you’re colour-blind.

So lately I’ve been experimenting with colour in my photographs. Not because I suddenly see it better, but because I stopped worrying about whether I see it right. These are simply the colours that appeal to me.

You can rely on instinct. But why do diagonal lines energize an image while horizontal lines calm it?
Long before photography existed, other artists struggled with the same questions. If a photograph is to carry meaning, instinct alone is not enough. There are rules, unwritten perhaps, but real nevertheless, that shape how an image is felt, not just seen.
Without structure, a photograph risks becoming a trivial snapshot: technically correct, emotionally empty.

I think my tendency to structure the form in my pictures is based on the hope that by doing so I leave sufficient headroom to you, the viewer, so meaning can surface.

Reducing form does not mean reducing depth. It means choosing deliberately. Controlling composition. Limiting distractions. Shaping light and contrast. Clarifying the visual structure so that your imagination can move between the pixels and fill the open space with significance. I often prefer one person in the frame. Two leave less room for interpretation.

When I carefully construct form, I actually release control over interpretation by leaving more room for you. For the context you bring to it.

Consider this short exchange:

Norma: “I’m leaving you.”
Norman: “Who is he?”

Seven words, and immediately you sense a larger story. Your social intelligence activates. You imagine emotional states, betrayal, jealousy, intimacy. Yet you do not know these people. Much of what you infer is assumption. Your mind fills the gaps because it resists emptiness.

The two sentences offer explicit information. Fact one: Norma and Norman are in conversation. Fact two: Norma announces she is leaving. These facts are visible and transferable.

But beneath them lies implicit meaning. You assume both characters are lovers rather than mother and son. You assume heterosexual desire. You picture a private setting. Unless, perhaps, you recall Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock, in which case your interpretation shifts entirely.

Photography works in the same way.

What you see in my image, the subject, the light, the composition, is the visible layer. What my image means to you depends on your own memories, experiences, and cultural references. A shadow may evoke childhood. A headscarf may carry political meaning. A gesture may echo something deeply personal.

As a photographer, I shape form. I simplify to create structure. I try to avoid triviality through discipline. But I cannot determine the invisible context you attach to what you see.

That is precisely why I value feedback. When you respond to a photograph, you reveal the context you have added. You show me how the image lives beyond my intention.

Meaning in photography does not reside solely within the frame. It emerges in the encounter between photographer and viewer. Somewhere between what I show and what you see, significance takes shape. And in that space, photography becomes more than an image. It becomes a dialogue.

So, let’s talk

…

Fast-forward to now. Reason again has gotten too loud. We’re living in peak data mode. Algorithms, studies and statistics everywhere.
But trust in “hard facts” is shaky. There’s a lot of distrust towards stuff like AI. Intuition pushes back.

Certainty feels oppressive. Final answers feel suspect. They leave no room to breathe, doubt, or change your mind. When everything is presented as measurable in digits, settled and unquestionable, personal experience starts to feel irrelevant and so ambiguity becomes a form of freedom rather than a flaw. When reality feels over-explained, we start looking sideways for something softer, stranger, more personal.

Is it that that I see in the work of contemporary photographers capturing social and urban life? Their images lean into blur, darkness, grain. Nights that feel ritualistic, friendships look mythological. It’s mood-first, meaning-second.

Look at Laura Pannack, who photographs young people with a tenderness that floats between realism and dream, making everyday moments feel quietly symbolic. Or Tania Franco Klein, whose staged scenes of modern isolation feel like stills from an emotional sci-fi film . Unhinged, but based in reality.

Like Jørgensen resisting the cold confidence of nineteenth-century science, or Gauguin escaping realism in search of myth, these photographers aren’t rejecting facts outright. They’re just saying: facts aren’t enough. Sometimes truth lives in atmosphere, in color, in the half-seen moment. When the world feels too sharp, we blur it. Not just to escape reality, but to survive it.

Here are a few of my photo blur(b)s.

What are the rules for capturing that instant?
Why does one photograph seem tender and another cold, one balanced and another arrogant? Why do certain lines of light move us, while others leave us untouched? Instinct claims to know, but it only points, feels, and hesitates, never explaining itself in logical terms.

Photographers shouldn’t be technicians but philosophers with an excellent sense for timing.
Exposure and aperture can’t explain emotion. Every frame is a decision about what matters most in that instant. A photograph looks objective, but it expresses subjectivity. It’s not the world we see, but the world seen through someone. The click of the shutter is both an act of precision and of confession.

Unlike painting, photography doesn’t wear its effort. There’s no visible brushstroke, no trace of labor. It looks clean, almost inevitable, as if truth has simply appeared and Lightroom doesn’t exist.
That’s its best illusion. The photograph feels factual, yet it’s full of arrangement, where to stand, when to press, what to leave out. It feels neutral only because it hides its choices well.

And yet, for all its tricks, photography still feels sincere. There’s something undeniably human about wanting to stop a moment.

With a crowbar in hand and dust swirling in the air, I felt unstoppable. I pried, hammered, and unscrewed. Hours later, I stood surrounded by rubble. Proud, but tired.

For the next two months, my world shrank to oven meals balanced on my lap in bed.

Next came my bike accident. Courtesy of a German woman who seemed to think a U-turn grants imperial right of way, forcing every other road user, cyclists included, to scatter.
She left me with a bruised foot and three long weeks confined to bed.

And then came my vacation: fourteen days of relentless cycling. Ghent, Tournai, Ostend, Bruges, and back to Ghent. By the time I crawled home, I was a wreck.
The last four days of my glorious getaway I spent entirely in bed, perfecting the art of doing absolutely nothing.

Life doesn’t become richer by adding more. Life gets richer if you just rotate your body 90° and live horizontally. That’s what I’ve learned over the past six months.

But, although my bed was practically my permanent residence, I did manage to capture a few moments on camera. Here they are.

Easy enough, right?

Now, do me another favor. I want you to take an individual photo of every single thing you see from where you’re sitting.
So, how many pics are you talking?

From where I’m sitting, behind my desk, we’re easily talking hundreds. Just earlier, my cat Vlo was chilling on my lap, and I can already count dozens of stray cat hairs she left behind. There’s a fruit bowl on my desk with maybe fifteen fruits in it. And the soil in that plant pot on the windowsill right in front of me? Covered in hundreds of fertilizer pellets.

Once you actually pay attention, you start realizing just how jam-packed your surroundings really are. Way more stuff than you’d guess at first glance. And each little thing’s got its own vibe: color, texture, smell, shine, scratches, whatever.

From a distance, all those fertilizer pellets might look the same. But get in close and it’s like, oh hey, that one’s chipped, this one’s got a brown spot, and that third one’s looking kinda crusty. Reality is messy, no two pellets are identical.

Now imagine you go full beast mode and decide to actually do the thing, take photos of every single object in sight, one by one, with monk-level patience. Then you print them all out and stack the whole damn pile on the table in front of you.

Think you could memorize every single detail in all of them? Go ahead and try, but I’m telling you now, your brain’s gonna tap out. It just can’t handle that kind of overload.

So what happens? According to Heidegger, the philosopher (yeah, we’re going there), your brain pulls a sneaky move. It slaps a filter on reality, a filter called “familiarity.”
When I close my eyes and think of a fertilizer pellet, I picture this generic little brown ball. Hard. Round. Kinda boring. Under a centimeter wide. Doesn’t smell like anything. That’s my mental stock image of “fertilizer pellet.”

So when I’m at my desk, looking at hundreds of real pellets in the plant pot, I don’t actually see fifty unique ones. I just see the same ol’ familiar pellet copied fifty times.

Bottom line? The way you perceive an experience (or a pellet) isn’t the same as the experience itself. What you’re really seeing is the simplified, memory-friendly, brain-approved version of it. And that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Reality’s too complicated to take in all at once, so we dumb it down just to get by.

To ease the burden on your mental processing, I've already pre-arranged reality a little for you in the pics below.

This, dear reader, is my reply to Harry’s scream. It comes with pictures. I hope you don’t mind. He doesn’t. I asked him politely upfront and only then I hit the road looking for photographs that could prove the points I make.

Harry, let’s start with your physical photography problems. You write: "…climbing up mountains with a pack full of gear that only gets heavier the further I climb. … Knees hurt. Back hurts."
Mate. You're not twenty anymore. Those days are gone. It’s time to pivot. Photography can be relaxed, lazy, decadent even.
I should know, I’m from Ghent and we are known for living the good life, plenty of food, wine, and late-night conversations.
Did I mention I do all inclusive workshops for street photographers?

Let me give you some examples. I took the photos below while sipping a Campari Orange at a café table that hadn’t been wiped down since the first lockdown (picture 1) or while swirling a Ricard-pastis like I had nowhere to be, nothing to prove, and all day to pretend I was in a French New Wave film (picture 2).
My knees were fine. My back didn’t scream. Life was good.

Then there’s this gem: "No bag is big enough for all the kit you don’t want to carry but have to... You spend thousands on gear. You get up at 4am to chase golden hour. You carry 50 pounds of kit on your so-called holiday."

Let me ask you this. Which cyclist enters the Paris-Roubaix cycling race riding a steel-framed monstrosity outfitted with rear view mirrors, a dangling foxtail on an antenna and a banana seat? Which footballer jogs onto the pitch strapped with a utility belt full of energy drinks and backup shoes? Which mountaineer drags a stove up the Mont Blanc just in case they fancy a hot chocolate on the summit?

The art, Harry, is knowing when to leave the damn stove at home. Here, let me show you the kit I’ve been using for the last 5 years:

And yes, even for a painfully preplanned, hyper-professional shoot starring a model with more followers than you’ve had hot meals, it does the job. Look:

You also wrote: "Shooting film is a trust fall with gravity. You don’t know what you’ve got until you get home."
You know who else doesn’t know what they’ve got? People without a plan. You think pro cyclists just… vibe the route? That footballers boot the ball in a random direction and hope for divine guidance? No, Harry. Intent. That’s what we’re missing here. The age of aimless experimentation? Also over.

To prove my point, I planned on making two pics today. Before I even left home, I knew what I would take home on my SD card: one picture with a plus shape, and one with a mushroom shape. Here they are.

And please, this bit: "I hate that phones are better than most of the kit I shot with ten years ago."
Don’t let it get to you, mate. Ten years from now someone’s gonna write, “I hate that AI-generated images are better than the 2,000€ phone I shot with in 2025.” It’s the circle of strife.
Sure, you could blog your way through the pain, but chronic stress causes hair loss and also numerous physical and mental health conditions, including but not limited to: chronic fatigue, diabetes, obesity, depression, and a sudden fondness for landscape presets. So it would be better that you just put your kit in the bottom drawer of that IKEA cabinet in your garage you’ve never properly assembled. Throw a towel over it. Forget it exists. Then buy a phone.

The picture below was not taken with a phone (I’m almost bold and depressed already, so I can take the stress), I’m just tossing it in for vibes, something mellow to help you chill.

Now, onto your theological crisis: "I hate that I now know more about file storage architecture than I do about my own feelings," followed by: "Photography is pain and worship and noise and stillness and heartbreak and hope. It’s heavy."

Harry. Sweetie. Photography is not a religion, it’s not a means to torture you real self into existence.
I can picture you now, in the dim glow of your darkroom, flagellating yourself with the neck strap of your latest Fuji camera. Or the Nikon battery charger cable for high holidays.
But hey, as long as you’re not mistaking SD cards for communion wafers, who am I to judge? I’m not here to put people into boxes.

Now, your only bulletproof line was this: "Marketing your work? A joyful ritual of humiliation. If you don’t make a TikTok where you dance with a Fujifilm around your neck, you might as well be invisible."

Touché. I have no answer. I walked straight into a wall here.
But I’m looking forward to it, Harry. I’ll see you on Substack Video, dancing your way into all our hearts. It’ll be a blokebuster.

We’ve brought a newborn baby boy with us and we place him with his back against the stalagmite. Then we fasten his head to the rock so that he can only look straight ahead, directly at the cave wall in front of him. There’s no way for him to turn his head even slightly to see what’s going on behind. Whatever’s happening back there is, for him, non-existent.

Now, behind the baby, where it can’t see, we install a bunch of bright spotlights. Their beams hit the cave wall in front of the baby, the part it can see.
Next, we position ourselves between the spotlights and the baby, so that our shadows are projected onto the wall in front of it.

And then we wait. Patience is key. We let our (purely theoretical) baby grow up like this. Over time, the only thing it ever sees are the shadows dancing across the cave wall, the shadows of whatever’s going on behind its back. People walk past. Dogs. Chickens. Kids playing. Bearded men doing their thing. The baby grows up hearing the echo of their voices bouncing off the rocks.
If we were to ask our now fully grown boy to describe reality, he would speak in terms of shadows and echoes. That’s reality, as far as he knows. The only version of reality he has any language for.

Now, if we were to unstrap its head and let it see what’s actually behind it, it wouldn’t understand a thing. It wouldn’t even have the vocabulary to describe what it's seeing.

That was Plato. Now let’s throw Heidegger into the mix. He told us the world is complex. It doesn’t just exists, it shows up differently depending on how we feel, where we stand, and what we care about. Things aren't just things, they matter to us in specific, often messy, context-driven ways.

Now let’s take that insight and apply it to Plato’s cave. We tweak the scene slightly. Instead of the spotlights we installed earlier behind the baby, we install video projectors. A thousand of them, each projecting a different film, overlapping and criss crossing all over the cave wall in front of the baby. What the baby sees now isn’t just shadows, but a visual chaos. A kaleidoscopic mess of images. That’s its reality now.

As human beings, we have feelings. Moods. Emotions. Vibes. Whatever you want to call them. Heidegger calls it sensibility. It’s from this sensitivity that we approach the world. It’s how we recognize the things around us, sometimes with disgust, sometimes with desire.

Back to the baby in the upgraded cave: its sensibility will help it make sense of the visual noise. Out of the endless stream of images, it might focus on a scene with a bunny rabbit. Next, maybe a picnic. Then maybe a romantic kiss, blended into the background of a war film.

This is how we discover the world: through our sensibility. Not just the physical stuff, but everything. Tensions in the air, a sense of belonging around a campfire, the nosy energy of someone about to spill gossip. These are the things, these entities, that we tune into, and around which we shape our behaviour.

Here’s how I perceived our shadowy world for the last two weeks.

Back in 2008, researchers Shanyang Zhao, S. Grasmuck and Jason M. Martin pointed out in their paper "Identity Construction on Facebook: Digital Empowerment in Anchored Relationships" that people actually don’t like talking about themselves too explicitly on social media. No surprise there, right?
Instead, we craft our online identity in other ways, through profile pictures, likes and carefully curated posts (sometimes containing photographs). It’s a neat little trick because, in real life, you get to switch gears: professional mode at work, party animal with friends, and the sweet, well-behaved kid at your parents’ dinner table.
Online? Nope. Facebook (and the rest of the internet) only accepts one type of context, an all-encompassing one size fits all “like-” or “follow-” relationship.
But your online audience is a chaotic mix of coworkers, family, exes, and distant acquaintances, so good luck keeping all your different personas in check.

And here’s the kicker: it’s not just context that crumbles online, time does too. The internet is ruthless. It never forgets. Your old posts? Maybe they’re buried deep in your profile or even deleted, but search engines will dig them up like digital archaeologists. Your online presence is just like your passport photo, or, by extension, any other photo. Frozen in time, unable to evolve.

In the real world, you can change your mind, grow, and gain new perspectives. But that tweet you posted two years ago? That thing is carved into the internet like an ancient tablet, waiting to trip up your future self.
The people in the photos I took last week share the same fate. Trapped in rigid pixels, sealed off from the ever-shifting, unpredictable mess we call reality. Forever exiled from the ever-moving, ever-changing reality.

All it really is, is just another collection of soulless snapshots, crammed with needless details that obscure the real subject. Your street portraits, your oh-so-funny subway ads, your misty bridges, your sleek architecture, your “candid” passersby. All of it, pure, unfiltered, meaningless drivel that distracts from what actually matters in real street photography.

All of the other so-called street photographers churn out surface-level nonsense with zero street cred. Just stylized snapshots of everyday life, nothing that reeks of sunbaked pavement, heating up under the summer sky. Their slick little pictures have all the charisma of a wet dog, when they should hit with the weight of bedrock. Hell, a greasy dish rag festering in the sink of some mold-infested back-alley diner for two weeks has more character than those sterile, lifeless frames, lacking concrete, macadam, gravel, cobblestone, or hell, even bitumen.

From now on, I’m chasing raw emotion. The grit, the grind, the brutal, unpolished, down to earth, under your feet reality.

I want my images soaked in blacktop, gravel and the cracked, faded paint of the road marking. That, and only that, is real street photography. Everything else? Utterly disposable.

Only I bring you the real.

These are structured arrangements with strangers, defined by what Apostel called a “functional, instrumental points of interest.” Take your new kitchen, for example. You and your contractor don’t bond over a shared love of countertops, you just both want the job done. The same goes for your colleagues at work, your relationship exists because of a shared professional goal, nothing more.

But what happens when you invite a friendly coworker over for dinner at your home? According to Apostel, that’s when you shift from cold, contractual relationships to a “community-based relationship.” You now entered the world of people who genuinely share interests, values, and emotions. A community is a small, close-knit group built on personal relationships. Here, people aren’t just functioning together, they actually care about each other.

Apostel argued that in modern society, these warm, social connections are being pushed aside by rigid contracts, regulations, and economic systems. The result? Increasingly impersonal interactions, driven more by efficiency than by human connection. Our sense of belonging is fading, and our inner competitive predator is being overstimulated by the way society operates.

It starts early. Schools emphasise individual achievement over collaboration. Social media feeds the same competition, showing us only the highlight reels of other people’s lives, making us chase bigger and better. Success and performance have become the cornerstones of our world, drilling into us the need to outshine others.

Is that why I keep seeing so much talk about “doing projects” in photography? Is photography about performance, about setting goals and achieving them? Does it have a “functional” or “instrumental” purpose? Or are we simply trying to bring a little beauty, a little humanity into the world, to push back, even just a little, against the coldness?

Enlighten me, my photography friends. I wonder how you think about this.

Anyway, here is the contribution I have gathered over the past two weeks.

With every new question, the child tightens its grip on its unsuspecting caretaker. Because, let’s be honest, what is a question if not a glorified command? A thinly veiled order demanding an answer. Every time dad responds, he submits. And with every additional answer, he only sinks deeper into the quicksand of his own logic. Once he’s said something, well, he can’t just take it back, can he?

Each new question corners the caretaker into an ever-narrowing space, while the glorious, free-spirited child dances around like an archer, firing off their question-arrows from any and every direction.
If you want to stop this relentless assault, forget about crafting the right answer. That’s amateur hour. No, the real power move is reclaiming control. Either drown them in an excruciatingly long-winded monologue that bores them into silence, or, if you’re feeling a little less delicate, demand absolute quiet.

Every question is, in essence, a shameless claim on your time, your energy, and, by extension, your basic human dignity. More than that, it's an invasion of your personal mental space. The questioner is digging, prying, itching to extract something from your inner world.
Uncomfortable with that? Lucky for you, there exists a weapon of pure genius: the secret.

Ah yes, the secret, a perfectly sealed, utterly opaque little orb of mystery. A shadowy bullet of knowledge locked away in an impenetrable fortress deep within you, completely out of reach of any nosy little interrogator. Keeping a secret, resisting the urge to spill despite the relentless provocations, bestows power. You force respect through silence because you decide what remains unspoken.

Of course, there’s a catch. (Isn’t there always?) The silence required to protect a secret inevitably isolates you. And don’t be fooled, secrets aren’t passive little things. No, no, they grow, intensify, fester. They heat up, pressurise, turn into ticking time bombs. Walk around with one long enough, and you’ll start feeling that eerie, suffocating tension, the creeping paranoia that at any second, the whole thing might explode. That fear alone is enough to lock you into a state of rigid, exhausting vigilance. The secret owns you now, anchoring you in place, making you stubborn, inflexible.

In “Sean Combs, Neil Gaiman, and the Terrible Power of Secrets,” an article published in Rolling Stone, author Mikal Gilmore writes

The burdens we carry — particularly those related to hidden truths — can contribute to our psychological disintegration when they are hidden and held too close. Keeping those secrets will eventually catch up with you. When they do, they might offer you the sort of hard epiphany that, if acted on, leads you to a better place, a better self. That is, if you’re lucky and wise.

But some secrets can’t free the secret-keeper. Rather, the opposite. If we have knowingly harmed somebody — if we’ve stolen something that belonged to them but does not belong to ourselves, including their hope and faith; if we have laid waste to their spirit; if we have assaulted their body…Those are secrets that we want to remain secret. If those secrets are learned, the discovery could result in the devastation of our name, our standing, our career, our prospects for the future. The discovery of some secrets could cost the secret-keeper their wealth, their prestige. It could undo their legacy. It could even cost them their freedom.

I wonder what secrets the people I’ve photographed in the past few days are carrying. Are they still the keepers of their secrets, or have their secrets begun to keep them? Do you see anything that breaks through their surface?