Personal photography
I have cameras I haven’t touched in months. In fact I have cameras I’ve never used. They sit on a shelf, visible every time I walk past. Some moralists would tell me to sell them. To clear the clutter, to free the mind. Be honest about your actual practice. Stop kidding yourself.
They’re plain wrong because they’re looking at it from the wrong angle.
Photography sells itself as preservation. We take pictures to capture moments, to remember what happened, to hold onto people and places before they disappear. The promise is that the image will keep the past accessible, faithful, ready to consult whenever memory fails us.
That’s not what actually occurs. What happens instead is more complicated and more interesting. Photographs don’t preserve experience. They create scaffolding for reconstruction, and nostalgia is the primary material we use to build with.
Some of us maintain that gear doesn’t matter. And technically, we’re right: a camera won’t make you a better photographer. But there is another side to the debate.
Photography typically tries to stop time. We capture moments, freeze them, extract them from the flow of duration. But there’s another approach that interests me more: using photography to make time visible through its effects. Not the moment itself, but what happens across years of moments. Not the pristine object, but the object after it’s lived.
At the end of 2025, I quit my job of 5 years and looked for a new one. I don’t change job easily. In fact only once in 23 years to start the one I just quit. But I had reached a point of no return and didn’t feel I could stay any more.
Today, I started my new job, which involves some traveling, at least temporarily. So, like a 6 year old starting school, I decided to document it.
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.
