Why I Photograph While Travelling: Places and Moments

Leaving to See Differently

I did not start photography to make beautiful images. I started because I needed to leave. For years, I built virtual worlds, imaginary environments, digital architectures. I was comfortable in the world of screens. And then one day, that world felt too small.

I traded the keyboard for a camera and left. Not to photograph in the tourist sense of the word, but to discover places most people never see. Forgotten streets. Neighbourhoods that live at their own pace, far from the beaten track. Places where time seems to have stopped, or on the contrary where it accelerates in a way you find nowhere else.

 

What I Am Really Looking For

What draws me to travel is not monuments. It is people. The stories they carry without knowing it. An old man sitting in front of a doorway in Havana watching cars pass as if he has seen thousands go by. A street in Trinidad where children play without paying any attention to me. A light on a wall in Alexandria that will no longer exist in ten minutes.

I look for the moment just before it disappears. That moment when something is happening, when the emotion is there, present, tangible, and I know that if I do not press the shutter now I will never find it again. It is not technique. It is a kind of instinct you develop by truly being there, by inhabiting the place rather than passing through it.

 

Alone With the Camera, Never Alone in the Image

When I photograph, I am not simply with my camera. I am with everything that brought me there.

For example, "The Malecón Meridian" in Havana begins with a story: a battered taxi, my girlfriend and I looking for nothing more than a SIM card to find our bearings in the city. We arrive near the coast, meet a group of three strangers. They call a friend, who pulls up minutes later on a scooter and for a few Cuban pesos installs a brand new SIM. They offer us commemorative coins bearing Fidel's face before we part ways with a smile. And it is my girlfriend, a few minutes later, who signals me toward the view. That is where the photograph was taken.

It is not a photograph of Havana. It is the trace of that precise moment, of that unexpected generosity, of that light and that tension in the sky that no one else saw quite like that.

 

Relics, Not Souvenirs

I like the word relic. A souvenir stays in the mind and fades with time. A relic is something physical, tangible, that survives the moment that created it. My prints are relics of every step I have taken in those streets.

Places that are sometimes still accessible, sometimes already gone or transformed. Moments that will never return exactly as they were. When someone hangs one of my images on their wall, they are hanging something irreplaceable. Not a reproduction of a place, but the trace of a moment lived, felt, immortalised.

 

Black and White as a Universal Language

I work in black and white because colour anchors too firmly in the present. It says: it was here, it was now, it was like this. Black and white says something else. It says: this moment existed. It transcends the era, the place, the culture. A street in Trinidad in black and white speaks to someone who has never set foot in Cuba. It speaks to them of solitude, of human warmth, of time passing.

That is what I set out to convey. Not a place. An emotion. And that emotion crosses borders, languages, generations. It lives in the image long after the moment itself has disappeared.