Personal photography
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.
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.
For me, photography is a deeply solitary process. It’s not something I do in the company of others, nor in groups, and I don’t really talk about it with anyone directly. In an era of social media and oversharing, where every moment seems to be documented for likes and comments, this may seem counterintuitive. But for me, the act of taking photos is about introspection. It’s a personal experience. One that doesn’t require, and is often hindered by, external input.
Since I started taking photography seriously ca. 2003, the craft has become democratised beyond recognition. Every pocket contains a device capable of producing images that would have required thousands of euros of equipment twenty five years ago. But, I see the same tired shots repeated endlessly: the obligatory sunset, the artfully arranged breakfast, the mirror selfie with calculated spontaneity, the same copycat shots of the masters.
This saturation creates an interesting paradox: we’re drowning in images whilst starving for actual photography. Are we really all photographers?
Your habitual locations tend to feel boring, empty of photographic interest. Ordinary is a curse. But are they, really? Is it really what the problem is?
