Like every year, it takes me a while to get into the swing of the new year. Last Saturday was perhaps the day when I really got back into it. I only spent the late afternoon walking the streets of Saint-Denis, but it was enough to make me realise how much I missed pounding the pavement in my city. I had tried to get back into the swing of things in the previous weeks, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I tried to force myself to go out, but as is often the case in these situations, if your head isn’t in it, there’s no point.
It’s very hot here at the moment. We’re still in hurricane season, and it takes courage (or no choice) to walk through the stifling streets of Saint-Denis. Even with the best will in the world, when I was there, I had only one desire: to take refuge in a café or bar to enjoy the air conditioning! So last Saturday, when I left work at 4 p.m., I decided to hang out in Saint-Denis for a while. It was late afternoon and the heat was more bearable. As the sun was lower in the sky, the buildings provided nice shaded areas to take shelter. It was Valentine’s Day and also the weekend of the sales. So there were quite a few people in town, much to my delight.
I recently uploaded two videos to YouTube. It’s not that I want to post on Zuckerberg’s platform again, but it was the most effective way for me to share these videos on my blog. I am limited in the file size I can host on my website, so I use YouTube to host my videos. I didn’t tag the videos at all because I don’t care about SEO. That’s not why I posted them. However, John Harper shared these videos with Tim Huynh, a very active vlogger who has a pretty successful YouTube channel. I’ve known Tim for a while, from back when I was still active on social media, but we’ve grown apart. He’s become a big name on YouTube with his channel Word On The Street, which attracts huge amounts of traffic with thousands of views on each video, while I’ve cut myself off from all visibility and locked myself away in complete anonymity.
What I did, I did voluntarily because, in general, I found social media tiring and, above all, too superficial. It must be nearly seven years since I deleted everything, and frankly, I don’t miss it at all. Tim doesn’t understand why I keep all this work confidential, sharing it only on my blog, which is read by about twenty people at most.
Does a tree make a sound when it falls if no one is there to hear it?
By analogy, one might ask: what is the point of taking photographs if there is no one to see them? Well, as I have always said, I take photographs because I enjoy it. I enjoy wandering the streets and capturing moments, I enjoy observing people, I enjoy watching life unfold before me and witnessing interactions between people. And that’s enough to make me happy. I created this website and blog initially to archive my journey when I started street photography. I also had the ambition to be able to connect with photographers who would understand my approach and appreciate what I do.
Since I started this blog many years ago, I have occasionally had photographers write to me to exchange ideas or just say a few words about my site. In recent months, even though I’ve been writing fewer and fewer articles, I’ve been surprised to see photographers contacting me to tell me about my blog, which they’ve recently discovered, and how much they’ve enjoyed reading it. Below are some of the emails I’ve received.
I have absolutely no idea how these people ended up on my blog. Okay, there’s Google, but my site still has to appear in search results. I talk about a lot of things related to street photography, whether it’s the practice itself or the equipment used. But I don’t think it’s well referenced, and as I said, since I’m not on social media, you really need a huge stroke of luck to stumble upon my site.
For me, these emails are worth all the likes in the world. The blog and website take on their full meaning. Connecting people! And it motivates me to write, to keep doing what I do, because somewhere, someone on the other side of the world might discover what I do and be touched by it, or recognise themselves in my way of seeing things. In short, these emails might seem ultimately quite insignificant, but for me they mean a lot.
All the photos were taken with the Ricoh GR3 | Crop 35mm.
They’re all coming from my blog 😂 There’s loyalty for you, I’ve gone from 11 readers to 5.
I’m writing one at the moment, but I may not bother now I’ve read yours. It begins with me being “in a funk” and ends with the current social media situation. In between I talk about the weather. There’s some photos, but never close to being at your level.
Tim loves your work I’m certain. I wish he’d promote it. I wish I could too. It deserves attention.
You do promote a lot my work and I should already thank you for that. In today’s world it’s complicated to stand out. We’re overwhelmed by billions of photos. Everything is lost in an ocean of pixels. We’re just craftsmen doing their little work anonymously. That’s fine for me. Sometimes some people discover our work and like it.
The ‘worth a thousand likes’ concept is interesting from a photography perspective — the images that resonate most deeply are often not the technically perfect ones but the ones that capture something emotionally true. The travel photography that endures tends to be about people and moments rather than landscapes.
Great piece!