Flâneur at Work, the name of this site and of the diary, starts from an old word. In nineteenth-century Paris a flâneur was someone who walked the city with nowhere in particular to go, for the pleasure of watching it: the crowds on the new boulevards, the shop windows, the strangers passing by. The poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that the flâneur lives in the crowd the way a fish lives in water, and that he feels at home anywhere as long as he is away from his own house.¹ A few decades later the German critic Walter Benjamin described him as someone standing on a threshold, right in the middle of the crowd without ever quite belonging to it.²

It isn’t hard to see where photography comes in. Once cameras were small enough to carry around all day, the aimless walker finally had something to do with his hands, and street photography is more or less what came of it. The American writer Susan Sontag, in her essays on photography, put it without much tenderness: the photographer is “an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno”.³

The “at work” comes from the road signs that say Men at Work, and it describes something real. A flâneur is supposed to have nothing to do, and yet the people who have studied him tend to describe someone idle and busy at the same time.⁴ That is exactly how these walks feel to me. Anyone watching would say I’m wandering about, while I’m paying closer attention than at almost any other moment of my week.

the mark, and the road sign it comes from

Looking back over ten years of walking with a camera, the first several were spent chasing someone else’s idea of a good picture. Street photography has its own competitions and festivals, and before long I knew exactly what a winning picture looked like: several layers of people stacked one behind the other, light falling on precisely the right face, everything in place for a fraction of a second. Behind all of it stands Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, the idea that a great photograph is the one instant in which everything in front of you lines up, and that the photographer’s job is to wait for it.

Some of what I brought home that way did well, and I’m still glad it did. What I only noticed later was that I had started walking past things I liked because they would never be complicated enough, and that I was choosing my photographs by guessing which ones a jury would choose.

Things loosened up when I read how others had told the same story. In their history of street photography, the photography historian Colin Westerbeck and the photographer Joel Meyerowitz point out that Cartier-Bresson’s famous book was called, in French, Images à la sauvette, which is closer to pictures snatched on the run than to anything decisive. They go as far as arguing that “the moment truly typical of street photography … is the indecisive moment”, the one in which nothing has been settled yet.⁶

That is much nearer to the way I work now. I take a picture when something makes me want to, even when I can tell it’s slight, or that someone else would walk straight past it. Plenty of these photographs won’t win anything and some people won’t like them, and I’ve found that this bothers me a lot less than I expected it to.

What I’m after is easier to recognise than to explain. Usually it’s something slightly off: a gesture that doesn’t belong to the place where it happens, an advert that seems to answer the street below it, an ordinary afternoon that turns strange for a second and then goes back to normal. I like pictures that leave a question open and don’t explain themselves, even when that makes them a little uncomfortable to look at.

The equipment is simple on purpose. I use small digital compacts, quiet enough that most people don’t notice them, usually with a filter in front of the lens that softens the image a little. I often use a flash too, though not always: it depends on the light and on how close I am.

It’s probably also why this kind of photography usually doesn’t sit well in commercial work, where a brand tends to want the product clear and the person flattered. It belongs in places that want a point of view, like a magazine story, a book, an exhibition, a project about a city or a print on someone’s wall.

Some of the work has travelled. Martin Parr picked one of my pictures for a Life Framer open call in 2018, and Steve McCurry, judging the Exibart Street Contest 2021, put one of my series in the top ten. In December 2019 a print hung at HistoryMiami Museum during the Art Basel Week, and in 2023 I co-authored “10 Street Photography” with photographers whose work I had been following for years.

awards, exhibitions and press