When I started street photography almost 10 years ago in March 2016, I knew nothing about the practice. At that time, it was already gaining momentum and was very popular. I became very interested in everything related to street photography. There weren’t many blogs about it, or perhaps I didn’t know where to look. I have developed my skills over the course of these 10 years.

My style has evolved considerably since I took my first photographs in Aix-en-Provence. I remember that day quite well. It was quite intimidating to point the camera at people to photograph them, and the easiest thing to do was to take photographs while walking to avoid any unpleasant confrontations. I don’t know what I was afraid of! Then, for a long time, I started taking close-ups of people, as if photographing them up close showed that I was a guy who had what it takes and was bold enough to take photos with a 28 mm lens 70 cm from their faces… I must say that this was my bread and butter for quite some time. To tell you the truth, I’m not really interested in it anymore. In fact, I’ve given up the 28 mm to devote myself solely to the 35 mm.

For the past few years, I feel like I’ve finally found what I love about street photography. It’s not the light and shadow effects, which I find very tiresome, nor is it, as I said above, close-ups, nor is it high-contrast black and white photos (I’ve done a lot of that too and got tired of it…). No, what I love is just the banality of the street. I discussed this with John Harper. Nothing pleases me more than scenes of street life that are depressingly mundane. The kind of things you regularly come across in the street without paying any attention to them because they’re so ordinary. Of course, when I photograph these kinds of scenes, I try to highlight the moment I’m capturing.

I am very sensitive to the energy that emanates from a scene. It is this same energy that I want the viewer of the photograph to feel. I want them to feel like they are right there beside me at the moment I pressed the shutter button to capture that moment. I also love mingling with the crowd so that no one pays attention to me, as if I were part of the street. I know very well that with my camera, however small it may be, I don’t go unnoticed. People see me and aren’t fooled. But after a while, it’s as if there’s an unspoken agreement and people no longer pay attention to what I’m doing, and that’s when I really enjoy myself!

A picture paints a thousand words! Here is my selection of my 12 photos from 2025. As always, this is a very subjective and personal selection from the past year, which would be very different if I were to make it in a few weeks’ time… But this selection may help you better understand what I have tried to explain above.

I have also included a longer slideshow of my work this year below if you would like to take a look.

As I forgot to wish you a Happy New Year 2026 in my previous blog post, I’m doing so now! Above all, I wish you and your loved ones good health. And thank you for following me over the past year.

Happy New Year 2026!

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Before going any further, as usual, this Blog is about Street Photography. I only talk about what I know. I wouldn’t dream of talking about photography in general. All my thoughts are based on the premise of Street. And of course my word is not gospel. It should be taken for what it is. Just my point of view on the matter. You can disagree and that’s fine.

In my previous articles, I said that I didn’t have any particular talent for street photography. From my point of view, all you have to do is observe what’s going on in the street and capture what’s happening in front of you. I looked a lot at other people’s photos. Whether it’s amateur photos like yours and mine, but also by reading the Masters books that I’ve bought. At home, I have Winogrand, Parr, Webb, Depardon, Meyerowitz, Klein, Moriyama… You see, there’s plenty to educate your eye by trying to deconstruct the photos of these Masters to understand what makes them so interesting.

For me, there are a whole host of elements that make a photo a success. By studying the photos, you can see why they appeal to you. I’m going to try and list some of the things that are essential to me in the street. That’s what attracts my attention. This doesn’t guarantee a successful photo, but these are elements that can contribute, or at least they’re a starting point.

Photography: writing with light in ancient Greek. That says it all. Yes, light is very important in photography. There are all kinds of light, and no one is better than another. You can have preferences, but all types of light have their advantages. Obviously, if you’re going to do light/shadows, you’ll need a fairly harsh light that will allow you to play with the differences in contrast. Light also creates atmosphere. Whether the light source is in front of you or behind your back. These things are important, and depending on the mood you want to create, you’ll need to move around in relation to the light source. For some photos, light can play an important role. You can have fun playing with it by juggling with silhouettes and shadows. What I prefer, though, is rather flat light. In other words, overcast days with clouds that give us a more diffused, softer light. The reason why I prefer this kind of light is because there are fewer shadows and it allows me to emphasise the composition and not take the easy way out and only consider strong contrasts.

Composition is an important element in good photography. The rules I set myself are fairly simple. I always try to get an image that is clear and readable. A photo that is balanced. That’s quite a complicated thing to achieve in the street and I don’t always succeed. You have to make sure that the people photographed don’t overlap with elements that make the photo difficult to read. For example, two people on top of each other, making it difficult to read. Very often I tend to want to stack as many things as possible in a photo. But in the end, I realised that the most important thing was not to add things, but to substract them. An overloaded photo will be a bit like an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Chinese restaurant… it’s an orgy but it’s really not very good. The street can be very messy and our role in the composition is to reorganise this chaos to produce something that is readable. When I’m on the street, I can manage up to 2 or 3 elements at the most in a composition. If there are more in my photos, it’s pure chance. I haven’t mastered the rest of the elements and I’ve let them take on a life of their own in the composition. But 2 elements are a good starting point.

Gestures are what attract me in the first place. As soon as I see one, a little siren goes off in my head. WARNING! This same gesture can be fleeting and, if I’m not far away, it can be enough to set off the alarm. If I’m further away, I quickly move closer, hoping that this gesture will be prolonged or repeated. Why gestures? We often shoot at 1/500s or even faster in the street. So our photos are a snapshot, a captured moment. It’s not like video where the image represents life. In a photo, everything is static. We’ve encapsulated a moment in an image and the gestures give life to the photo. It’s a way of giving movement. Oh sure, there are other ways of giving an impression of movement in an image, but gesture is what I prefer.

There are also interactions between people in the street. Humans are social animals and therefore interact very often with their fellow creatures. I’m always on the lookout for these moments because there’s always something that can come out of them. Enthusiasm, frustration, joy… and all these reactions lead to what I was talking about in the previous paragraph: gestures! As street photographers, we like to capture these little moments in the street. We do humanist photography where people are at the centre of our concerns. I sometimes take photos without anyone in the frame, but that’s not what I prefer.

I’ll stop here. So what’s that all about? As far as I’m concerned, when I’m out on the street that’s all I’ve got in my toolbox. Light, composition, gestures and interaction. That doesn’t guarantee a good photo, but it’s a good starting point. There are many other things that make a good photo, like things that are less tangible, less visible but that you can only feel. I’ll just mention the atmosphere, the tension, the energy, the mystery… From my point of view, a good photo is not just an accumulation of everything I’ve said, but must include certain elements that will capture the viewer’s attention. It also has to ask questions. What’s going on here? Why is someone reacting like that? What’s going on outside the frame that’s causing so many reactions? If I spend time on a photo asking myself all sorts of questions, it’s because I think the photo is a success. I’m not a big fan of the current fashion for visual jokes such as superimpositions or juxtapositions, or the hyper-graphic photos that are all geometry and contrast. These kinds of shots are empty and are just good for Instagram.

Very often it’s in post-processing that the photos really reveal themselves. When I shoot, I don’t see everything. I see things as a whole. I’m going to disappoint some people, but unfortunately for me, I can’t say that I saw exactly everything that was happening in my frame and that I clicked at that precise moment. No, that’s not how it works for me. Except in cases where there’s only one element in my photo, very often I feel that things are happening and I can make out more shapes than anything else. These shapes are parts of the image that I find interesting. For example, in the background on the left there’s a little scene, on the right there’s a static figure and in the foreground there’s another person. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear … For me, it’s during post-processing that the magic happens of discovering the final image.

For me, a good photo is a captured moment. It doesn’t have to be fantastic (but it can be!). It can be distressingly banal, but it’s a moment, a fragment of life unfolding before us. On the other hand, I don’t believe in the ‘decisive moment’ attributed to HCB. Why decisive? Because it marks the point of maximum tension? the tipping point? The most important moment? That was the American translation: the decisive moment. If we refer to the HCB’s book, the French version of the book was ‘Images à la sauvette’. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with it! It’s true that you capture a moment and that’s what I prefer in the street. But as for weighing it down with the adjective ‘decisive’, personally, I wouldn’t do that for my work.

So that’s my point of view on the subject. I don’t know what John has written at this moment. I have no doubt that the two posts will complement each other and you’ll get the point of view of two different people anyway. I think I share with John a fairly similar vision of Street Photography, but we nevertheless have different sensibilities. I invite you to read his article here.

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I keep saying that everything I do, a lot of people could do the same if they had a solid grounding in Street Photography. It’s not false modesty. I don’t feel I have any real talent for photography. What I can do is observe and transcribe what I see into images.

I sincerely believe that to do Street Photography, you need to educate your eye by looking at lots of photos to dissect the elements that make them interesting. Study the work of the greats to develop your photographic culture. As for the rest, once you’ve got all that down, all that’s left is practice, and I still think that luck and opportunity play an essential role in the results you achieve.

As far as opportunities are concerned, it’s quite simple to understand. Clearly, you’ll have more opportunities in big cities like New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Saigon and Hong Kong than in towns like Saint-Denis, for example. You know what I mean. Some people who live in these cities say that it has nothing to do with the size of the city. Well, I disagree. OK, it’s not everything, but stop fooling me. It’s infinitely easier to do Street in big cities.

As for luck, well, sometimes you come across improbable situations or characters who are out of the ordinary. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place and you don’t have to do anything but click. But one thing’s for sure, the more you wander the streets, the more often you’ll feel lucky…

On the other hand, if there’s one thing, it’s that you have to make your own luck! A little anecdote from our last trip to Vietnam. We were about to fly from Can Tho to Con Dao Island. A taxi was due to pick us up from the lodge at 11am. As usual, I was up at 6am and decided to go and see the Cai Rang market. This floating market was one of the most beautiful in Vietnam. We deliberately avoided it because I’d read some recent articles that didn’t look too good and said that this market had become a real scam.

So here I am, up at 6am. I try to book a taxi or a motorbike via the Grab app (it’s the Asian Uber) but nothing. As our lodge is on the outskirts of town, I can’t find anyone. A quick check on Maps shows me that the market is 6 kms away… A 1h30 walk. I say to myself that I’m going to go anyway and to come back I’ll take a Grab. After sweating for 30 minutes walking along the main roads being careful not to get run over, I finally manage to order a motorbike thanks to Grab who picks me up on the side of the road to take me to Cai Rang. I arrive directly near the land market, which is super interesting. It’s a bit crazy with so many people there and as far as photos go, I didn’t know where to turn. But I still wanted to go and see the floating market by walking along the river bank to see what it looks like.

I pass very few people on the riverbanks. On the river where the floating market is supposed to be, there are very few merchant boats and a large majority of tourist pirogues. So I’m not at all sorry I didn’t embark on a trip to visit the floating market by pirogue. I arrived at a quay where several boats were berthed filled with watermelons.

They were in the process of unloading them to be loaded onto trucks that would surely be distributing them elsewhere. I stood there for quite a while watching the ballet unfold before me. I was accosted and offered boat rides (again), which I politely declined. For me, this is the place to be. I took what I consider to be my best photo of Vietnam.

I couldn’t have taken this photo anywhere else but on the riverbank. I had to make up my mind at the last minute to go to this market and, above all, kick myself to set off on foot with the prospect of walking 1.5 hours along a road. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find at the market. That’s why I say that sometimes you have to take chances. That’s what I did that day. The rest is just being patient, working on your composition. I already had a raw scene. I just had to wait for all the elements to fall into place before I could take THE photo. It’s not false modesty to say that any other street photographer could have done as well or better than I did. For me, finding a good scene is more than 50% of the photo. The rest depends on the composition and the moment when you click the shutter. Which, between you and me, is just as important as finding the scene! But once you’ve got a situation, it’s just a game of constructing the image by adding or removing certain elements.

That day I followed my instinct to go and have a look around Cai Rang. I did the right thing, and by doing so I brought about an encounter with the people working along the river. I was then able to take the Grab back to the lodge to meet up with my little family, who were sitting down to breakfast before setting off for new adventures on Con Dao Island.

Here are the photos I took (well, the ones I retouched…) on the banks of the Cai Rang river.

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