The fourth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about a wannabe street photographer standing in a backstreet in Brussels with that itchy feeling something isn’t quite right.
I’m not sure where this story came from, exactly. It might have started with the title, with its misleading whiff of body horror, or it might have been inspired by watching too much photography YouTube.
YouTube, in case you didn’t know, is full of channels run by people faking it until they make it in their chosen creative field. They’re obliged to talk with great authority, making bold declarations and shocking statements, because the algorithm likes that.
But it’s usually painfully clear that they’re not that confident about what they’re saying – especially when they do a video one year on called something like “Why I was totally wrong about…”
I’m also amazed at how often they give all sorts of advice about how to take great photos and then cut to a gallery of their pictures, accompanied by chilled out lo-fi beats, and every single image is totally unremarkable. Or even straight up terrible, if not quite in Brooklyn Beckham’s league.
I know, I know… If you follow me on BlueSky, and have previously followed me on Twitter and/or Instagram, you’ll have seen plenty of my own unremarkable photos. But you’ll notice that I don’t have the nerve to make how-tos and video essays about them.
Another thing about the try-hard YouTube street photographer is that they’re often incredibly privileged. Several of them seem to lead lives where they drift from city to city, country to country, hanging out in luxurious rental apartments with their beautiful friends. And then spend the day taking pictures of homeless people or market stall operators because, you know, humbling and authentic and so on and so forth.
Back to that title, though: it’s refers to how the obvious presence of a photographer begins to change people’s behaviour, thus compromising the naturalness of a situation. It’s a phrase attributed to Joel Meyerowitz who took photos like the one below.
It’s a great example of the kind of picture Toby, my protagonist, would like to take and clearly the result of a practiced eye. Meyerowitz couldn’t have staged the two men dressed in yellow and red, echoing the colours of the traffic light next to them, but he sure as heck could wait until someone in yellow came along, and wait until the light turned red, and position himself to include the red phonebox and red-edged anti-littering poster at strategic points in the frame.
I am in awe of the bravery and confidence of the great street photographers – or, you might say, their arrogance and entitlement. But that’s a whole other debate. I’ve been challenged and shouted at when I wasn’t taking photos of people at all. Someone once pursued me over a mile because they were annoyed I’d taken a shot of an old sign on a factory building. I suppose what this story depicts is the ultimate fear that holds most of us back from taking photos of strangers: what if they really don’t like it and things turn nasty?
Why Brussels? Because it’s a city I’ve got to know fairly well over the years and, while I love it, it’s also somewhere I feel constantly on edge. It’s the only place, for example, where I’ve ever had a bona fide encounter with a pickpocket. It’s wild, chaotic and untidy. It can be beautifully photogenic, when it’s not terribly ugly. For all these reasons, it seemed like an interesting place to dump my anxious, unworldly protagonist.
You can order ‘Thin Places in Hard Concrete‘ now, with 10 brand new stories of everyday worlds weirdly out of whack: cults, ghosts, impossible infrastructure, haunted holiday apartments…
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