about current work of our members at strkng.com
This week I was in downtown and I decided to back to photograph something in black and white. Despite I consider now color is my main voice when it comes to street photography, I was looking to document street life in Mexico City, in a old school way and this is exactly where my instinct took me.
I like the pictures presented here because in my opinion I achieved o give them a film mood.
I am not new in photographing rough places. Indeed I live in a barrio of the north side of Mexico City, a popular barrio. And in all these years I have photographed in Tepito, Cuautepec, Itzapalapa, and I photographed also in EDOMEX, the state of Mexico in several parts, in particular in Naucalpan.
Despite my appearance as a foreigner recommends not going to take pictures in certain places, I do. Motivation is stronger than the fear of encountering problems. These are places that not even the Mexicans think for photography.
Yesterday I went to Plaza Meave. In the end it is a small area, between 2 streets; Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas and Republica de San Salvador. My wife advised me not to find myself there. There is a commercial plaza where they specialize in selling cell phones and other electronic equipment. The market is not completely crystal clear. There are also stories that come at you and simulate that you dropped your cell phone and then extorted money to repair it.
Yesterday I was there: i was not intentional. I just found myself…there. I can assure you that the vibe was completely different, even from Tepito. While in Tepito I photographed without any problem, here I could see how someone was looking at me and my camera. Despite this I decided to take 4 photographs that you see here.
It was just me and my camera. I could not know what the reaction could be. A man in particular observed me in a very bad way. I have been careful. More alert than usual.
The photos are not that good. But it shows a documentation of what I have been able to take at home from that place: Plaze Meave.
I’m delighted to have been selected for the themed group exhibition "Motion", to be held at PH21 Gallery, Budapest, August 26 – September 18, 2021.
Image link here:
https://www.ph21gallery.com/motion-21?lightbox=dataItem-kqwavhfn4
Exhibition link here:
https://www.ph21gallery.com/motion-21
When I first started photographing the streets of Rome during the pandemic for my 20/20 vision project, my primary interest was to record people, and the behavioural differences being played out on the streets in these strange times of social distancing and lockdown.
I live very close to the Vatican City, an area full of businesses that depend on tourism for their very survival. It’s a busy area which is usually thronging with crowds. Now there are many shuttered shop fronts, and permanently closed restaurants. Tourism is still predominately domestic at time of writing, but very recently, as restrictions slowly lift, there are suddenly more people on the streets. The atmosphere is charged again with an albeit faint buzz of human activity and renewed energy. I hope these recent photographs convey this.
Many people feel comfortable with the order and the beauty.
This influences their vision and prefers it when they observe. I can feel this sense of order in open contrast with the unpredictability, tension and chaos in the world. My work is an examination of the different forms of how the human animal adapts and shows its different faces in the world.
Without filters. Raw. Straight.
I enjoy to photograph moments where you can feel there is a particular kind of tension. It doesn’t really matter if I am on a street or in a little room. I am influenced both the relative quiet that the mathematics of chaos.
Essentially, I want to celebrate the human. I want to show the deep and indissoluble dichotomy between the eccentric and the ordinary. Photography and writing are always an interpretation of reality. In my photography there is a lot of emphasis on interpretation, because I always believed in this continuous relationship between the external reality and what is my feeling when I work both as a photographer and as a writer.
The space for interpretation is always present when I make a photograph. For this reason I think any photograph is a document of what happened in front of my eyes but also a witness of what it was my mindset at the moment to press the shutter button. A photograph is a revealing action, of the situation represented and also portrait of myself.
I borrowed the Hunter S. Thompson concept of Gonzo Journalism, and I speak of Gonzo Photography. I immerse myself in the situation, I enter it really, I put myself at stake, I take my own risks.
The photos you can see here are a reflection of my approach. I realized these photos in Ostia, I would say a barrio in Ostia, that is not completely safe to photograph there but I did it. Because I am a photographer working in Mexico in popular neighborhoods everyday.
I can remember how someone said me that I could’t reply the same approach in Italy…as if photographing in Mexico was easier …
In these images there is interaction and there is not. I don’t use just an approach and anything depends by the situation. To the end of the game to me is just about photographing life. Just like it is.
I hope you enjoy.
I realized this project in 2011, through a reflection about my mindset of a new arrived in Mexico City. I should create ghosts so I used a flash unit to achieve it. After the publication of that mini project I started to ser a lot of street photographers replying my technique.
Reality Remade is a reaction of my condition in that moment. I was arrived in Mexico City a year before and after that I still felt myself as a total stranger in town. In October 2011 I worked 3 weeks in Los Angeles where I met a lot of talented photographers and that experience was fundamental to me.
I returned from the United States with a lot of energy and a new spirit, above all full of ideas that I wanted to implement. I bought a Yongnuo 560 flash and despite I loved the use of flash on the street watched in the work of Bruce Golden my intention was just to have an experience with the flash for my street shots. I absolutely had to avoid imitating him. 1/30, 1/60, sometimes even 1/15 and the use of flash. It is a technique that has something random on the results and I was just experimenting while I was working. Experimenting just like still happens to me because I never want to stay in my comfort zone. This is how I learned a lot with photography.
Madero Avenue is a street very busy, which leads you to the Zocalo, the most important square in the center of Mexico City. I watched all these people pass in front of me and then disappear. People I didn’t know and who I probably wouldn’t see again in my life. It was like the life and death. You appear at a certain point and then disappear, just like everyone of us. I understood how that idea could be a theme of a project and the flash unit could be a fantastic tool to realize it: by creating ghosts on the street I could give to the viewer the sensation of ghosts, as existences of the past that appeared, spirits who still inhabited the city, continuing to animate it in their wanderings.
It was a project different from what you expect when it comes to Street Photography. It was my project. I was photographing the reality but playing with it, in order to propose a reflection that was completely personal, born from an inner feeling. It also does not happen or at least I had never seen it applied to street photography to tell about a theme that does not speak only of life but also of death.
You can read also some backstage considerations about the project on my blog:
https://alexcoghe.com/journal/reality-remade-story-of-a-street-photography-project
Street Photography, the good street photography is something that documents, that communicates something about a moment captured by the photographer, and therefore also reveals something about the author of the photo. A good street is a revealing moment, a sublime dichotomy of the ES and the world around it, or at least the perceived one. For this you have to be demanding, with the moment caught, if there is true content or not, if there is a composition worthy of this definition, if the street is genuinely represented and without forcing and overdubs, and therefore communicating that energy that only the street is able to reveal.
I photograph on the streets everyday. This makes myself a street photographer. And when you are a street photographer, you are another type of photographer, no matters if you make also other things, as I do as photojournalist and commercial photographer. You will know that the Street Photographer approach is always ready to come out.
After all these years making photos on the streets of Mexico, Italy and US I can see how I am grown up in the awareness that the experience on the street made me a different photographer. And a different human too.
As a street photographer I learned how gear is important to make your work, but I don’t have the fever to purchase all the cameras and the lenses. The GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) was never really something to me and for my photography. All over these years I could work with several cameras and lenses, some purchased, mostly loaned. I have experience with film and digital cameras, APS-C and Medium format, compact cameras. Anytime to me is not about having a geek approach to photography. There are guys knowing anything about technical issues of any camera on the market. I really don’t care about that. As I writer for me a pen is important because it is an instrument allowing me to write. For photography is almost the same.
But, of course I have my preferences: I work most of the time in popular barrios. And I spend a lot of time on the street. I just need compact, light and no flashy cameras. I love to work with analog point & shoot like my Olympus Stylus and Nikon L35. But I love also my Rangefinder Yashica Electro GSN. For digital currently I am using a Fujifilm XPro2 and a Fujifilm XT10. I purchased a manual lens: the 7Artisans 25mm f1.8. It is a great lens in my opinion with great color rendering, but you have to learn to work with because it is not accurate and often can become capricious, demanding. I think they build the lens focused on the bokeh…and this makes anything more complicated. Especially for a street photographer. Anyway you can have an idea with the photos on this post.
I want to create something useful for the STRKNG community on this blog, and I thought that this theme can be inspiring for other photographers.
The Street Photography Core to me is not about making perfect pictures. Photography in my opinion is a matter of content and form. It is fundamental that there is a good balance between content and form. Street Photography can’t be reduced to visual jokes, or even worst the optical effects we are seeing often today on instagram.
And Street Photography is an imperfect activity that lives of randomness. If you are focused on capturing the energy on the street, you almost don’t care anything is perfect on the frame. It is more important that a certain photo with certain elements inside the frame works. It is more important to be able to have a photograph with a content, showing the intent of the photographer, giving something of the documentation of the human condition. Something that you want to observe, possibly more than the time of a scroll of your mouse, something that you want to have as a print and maybe hanging on the wall at home.
The selection of the photos here present certain elements that are typical of my approach. It is imperfect photography that is perfect to me. One for all, look at the out of focus in the foreground of the girl picture. I would obtain that. I photographed her passing by because if I stopped myself in front of her, to frame and pressing the shutter button I would have lost that expression: maybe she would turn or smile, or react but I just wanted that expression. I can remember that exactly the day before I had gazed in awe at the portrait of a woman completely out of focus. I knew what I wanted and that leaving the lens at some distance would not have her in focus.
This is the Street Photography Core: to know the technique is OK if you can master it even to take an imperfect photograph, your personal photography.
As a street photographer, I take an observational view of how our present circumstances govern our behaviour individually and in crowds.
In developing scenes, I try to choose architectural backgrounds against which I can display separated figures, distributing or choreographing them across the frame. The architecture becomes incidental to a scene or situation that may or may not evolve within it. I tend to look for sites or places where people pass through without congregating. To begin with, if there is one figure or two or more figures who are positioned apart, I’ll wait until they’re joined by others in the hope that they’ll create a spatial and enigmatic dialogue.
There is a recent interview with me here:
https://www.thepictorial-list.com/2021-photographers/streetmax-21
…and a further article on my work here:
https://tagree.de/streetscapes-of-robotic-conformity-by-streetmax-21/
A photography project dictated by the circumstances of 2020 recording the streets of Rome in suspended animation during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As last year drew to a close and I started editing a selection of the most representative images from that year, it became clear to me that I needed to separate my 2020 street photography from my earlier "unstaged tableaux vivants" and urban landscapes.
Italy endured some of the toughest Covid-19 restrictions in the world, with months of lockdown, but also periods of relative freedom of movement. The images collated here are not a political statement and neither do they represent any personal acts of rebellion: I did not leave the house during periods of national quarantine to photograph the emptiness of the city. Instead, these are the photos I took while out and about on the streets of Rome whenever it was legally possible to do so, truthfully recording everyday life unfolding around me. I had no agenda other than seeing for myself how life outside my door was actually being lived during these strange times.
The project, like the pandemic, continues …. Part 2 to follow.
My ongoing project aims to offer a documentation about the social distancing, the use of masks and the diffidence of the other due to the Covid 19 pandemic, through a street photography approach. I am working in Mexico City downtown.
I consider that today street photography is the current photojournalism because unlike the latter it is still free from impositions that allow only the mainstream media to tell the world, censoring any critical thinking. Using the keys of irony and sarcasm, of a lateral vision that Street Photography brings with it, we have the opportunity to be the real witnesses of the social situation we are all experiencing.
I want that anyone looking at my pictures make your own opinion. I don’t want to suggest anything and I leave everything away from my personal judgment. Reality as it is already absurd enough.
From a technical point of view I am working as I am used to do: using zone focusing technique and currently I use a manual lens, the 7Artisans 25mm f1.8 mounted on my XPro2. Sometimes I use the Fujifilm XF 18mm f2.