Personal photography
Is this what New Year on social media looks like? I’ve never spent New Year waching social media before. Substack is new territory for me. But something immediately stands out this new year: the remarkable uniformity in what photographers are declaring they’ll do in 2026.
Like me, you’ve probably carried both phones and proper cameras through countless streets, events, and gatherings, and the difference in people’s reactions is stark enough to make you question everything we think we know about privacy and consent in photography.
I’ve always tried to understand things: how objects are built (I was the kind of kid that wanted to understand how his toys were made), how knowledge works (that led me to a PhD), and what makes me tick. When I started photography, that also became something I looked at to understand its mechanisms and how I relate to it.
That is why I started a newsletter on Substack. And it created a strange and unexpected feedback loop.
When I was a kid, I read all the Foundation extended universe books. One per day, I was obsessed. Not just because of the story but because the first book hit me hard: individuals don’t matter.
Photographers are split into two groups: those who swear by their gear and upgrade to the latest of everything all the time, and those who say that gear doesn’t matter. I used to be in the first group, I’m now in the second.
To prove my point, I got my hands on a lot of old Canon 40Ds for 8€ each. Canon released it in 2007. So these are nearly 20 years old. These have had a hard long lives (200K+ clicks, bits broken, rubber plugs broken or perished). But they allegedly worked, so I wanted to test them because I have plans for them (that will involve “deconstruction”).
Warning: big photo dump.
As a viewer of photography, when I look back at the images that truly stay with me, they almost always contain something strange. A detail that doesn’t belong. A gesture that seems out of place. A moment that cracked the frame open. In short: the unexpected.
I posted this photo last week as my contribution to Aminus3’s photo prompt: minimal. I thought I might as well explain it here.
A lot of photographers talk about AI like it’s the enemy. They’re furious about it: AI generates images that never existed, requires no skill, no vision, no time spent in the world observing. It’s cheating. It’s the end of photography as a legitimate practice.
They’re blaming at the wrong thing, though.
I took this photo in Paris on a November early morning. I published it in a note previously, but I thought it would be good to explain it.
Taken in the town near Paris where my parents live. I couldn’t resist the repetition of the heads.
