There is a moment every street photographer knows. The fraction of a second when someone notices the camera. When the eyes rise and meet the lens.

That moment kills the photograph for me. It kills my photograph.

Not because of discomfort, or any kind of power dynamic. Because of what the gaze does to the face. In a fraction of a second, the entire body reconfigures itself. The shoulders, the jaw, the expression. The person becomes someone who knows they are being looked at, which is an entirely different person from the one who existed two seconds earlier. They perform something, even involuntarily, even sincerely. They cannot help it. None of us can.

What interests me is the before. The state in which people exist when no one is observing them. The way bodies loosen within urban anonymity, the way the social face drops, the way they are no longer addressed to anyone. That is where I work. In that space of non-representation.

So yes, I keep shooting after the gaze. Sometimes something interesting happens in the reaction: surprise, total indifference, open hostility. But I already know that image probably won’t be part of the series. It documents the encounter. It does not document what I am looking for. I am not looking for the invented truth of a directed gaze. I am looking for my own sensitivity through the lives of others.

What I am looking for has no name. It is something that exists just before people remember that they exist.

To work in that space, you have to learn not to exist yourself. Or rather, to exist differently, to occupy the street in a way that does not trigger alertness. It is not discretion in the technical sense, not a matter of camera size or neutral clothing. It is an inner posture. When I walk while shooting, I am not searching. I am drifting. There is a physical difference between those two states, and people can feel it. Someone searching for something in the street draws attention without meaning to. Someone drifting blends into the general movement. The city absorbs those who resemble it.

It took me years to understand that. During my first street photography sessions, I would come home with hundreds of images of people looking into the lens. Not because I was shooting badly, but because I was shooting tense. Intention is visible. It shows in the way you walk, stop, anticipate. People do not consciously know what they are detecting, but they detect something.

There is also a question of speed. Not shutter speed, but speed of presence. The right moment in the street rarely lasts more than one or two seconds. What comes before the gaze is often a suspended state: a person between two thoughts, between two destinations, temporarily withdrawn from themselves. These states are brief and fragile. As soon as something interrupts them, including me, they disappear. My work is to be there while they last, not after.

This relationship to time has changed something in the way I see the city. I no longer really move through it. I inhabit it in fragments, through moments of intense attention followed by long stretches of walking where I shoot nothing. The best sessions are often the ones in which I press the shutter the least. Not because I have missed things, but because I was in the right state to recognize what deserved to be photographed and what did not.

The ethical question obviously exists. Photographing people without their knowing, without their explicit consent, in states where they believe themselves to be alone. I am not going to pretend it does not arise. But I think the answer is not in the law or in technique. It is in the intention. What I do with these images, what I say about them, what I build from them. I am not trying to expose people, to catch them in weakness, to document their vulnerability and turn it into a spectacle. I am looking for something universal within particular states. Solitude in the crowd does not belong to anyone in particular. It belongs to everyone. When I photograph someone alone in the middle of a crowded street, I am not photographing that individual. I am photographing a condition I share with them.

This is what has underpinned the entire Sans Contact series from the beginning. The crowd as a paradoxical space where solitude intensifies rather than dissolves. People side by side who do not exist for one another. Bodies close together whose presences do not touch. All of this becomes invisible as soon as someone notices the camera, because the gaze immediately creates a relationship, however brief, however hostile. And a relationship cancels precisely what I am trying to document.

That is why eye contact kills the photograph for me.

Not because it creates a technical or legal problem. Because, for the space of a fraction of a second, it resolves exactly what my work is trying to show.

There is a type of photography everyone recognizes immediately. Saturated colors, warm light arriving from exactly the right direction, a subject occupying the frame with a precision that seems natural but isn’t. The viewer’s gaze moves across these images without friction, without resistance. There is something deeply comfortable in that. Something deeply false.

I think of Steve McCurry. I think of Alex Webb, Joel Meyerowitz. Three photographers whose technical mastery is indisputable, whose images have traveled the world, whose work is universally respected. And whose aesthetic represents exactly what I am building myself against.

McCurry makes portraits. Faces looking into the lens with a calibrated intensity, in a light that flatters every feature, within a context that says something about the human condition without ever disturbing the person looking. His images are beautiful like icons. They have the closed perfection of icons. They leave no space for anything to happen between the image and you. Everything is already resolved.

Webb is more complex. His multi-layered frames, his interlocking colors, his street scenes where three simultaneous actions respond to one another in a composition that feels choreographed. You look at his images and you see the work, the intelligence of the gaze, the patience of the positioning. You admire. And that is where something gets lost. As soon as an image makes me admire its construction, it has failed to make me forget that it is an image. Meyerowitz belong to the same family: photography as progressive mastery, as control over the visible world. Images that already know what they are before they are even looked at.

As soon as an image makes you say “that’s beautiful,” it has lost you. You are looking at the composition, not at what is inside it.

What I am looking for is the opposite. I am looking for what happens before I have had time to frame, to wait, to build anything. The shutter release that comes before conscious decision. The image that exists because something happened in my body before it passed through my mind. This is not an aesthetic of accident in the romantic sense, nor is it an anti-technical posture. It is trust in another kind of knowledge: physical, embodied knowledge, built over years of walking through cities, no longer needing calculation in order to function.

Moriyama does not compose. He collides. His way of working is that of a body in motion within a space in motion, the finger on the shutter like a nervous reflex. Klein is the tilted frame, the closeness that assaults. In both of them, there is an urgency that can be read in the image itself, not as a defect to be corrected but as proof that something truly happened. Michio Yamauchi goes even further in another direction — his images are silent, inward, almost still — but they share the same honesty about their own making. They do not claim perfection. They carry the trace of what they cost.

When I look at one of my images that is too clean, too well framed, I recognize it immediately. There is something dead inside it. An image where I had time to compose says that I had time. And if I had time, it means the moment was not urgent. And if the moment was not urgent, then perhaps it did not deserve to be photographed.

I have produced images like that. More often in the beginning, when I still believed photography was a matter of progressive mastery, that you became better by learning to control more. There is a photograph I took a few years ago in a street in Rennes: late-afternoon light, a man sitting on a bench, his head slightly tilted, his hands joined. Everything is in its place. It is a beautiful image. I look at it and I do not recognize myself in it. It looks like an image I might have seen somewhere and unconsciously reproduced. It looks like an idea of photography rather than a photographic act.

The difference between the two is not visible to the naked eye. Technically, there is nothing to criticize in that image. What is missing is what Moriyama calls urgency. That internal tremor that makes you press the shutter because you cannot not press it. When that urgency is there, the composition happens without me — or rather, it happens through me, without my being its conscious architect. The frame is not thought. It is felt. And in its imperfections, it carries the trace of that state.

That is why I trust the accident. Not because accident is aesthetically superior to mastery. Because accident is honest about the conditions of its own production. A blurred, misaligned, noisy image says something about the moment in which it was made. It carries the traces of speed, proximity, inner state. It does not hide its origin. The beautiful image erases its traces. It presents an ordered, legible, accessible world. A world that does not exist.

I do not shoot to produce images that please. I shoot to produce images that are true. And the truth of what I see in the street — the truth of solitude in the crowd, of anonymity, of bodies coexisting without touching — does not take the form of beautiful late-afternoon light on a face turned toward the lens. It takes the form of something almost missed. Something slippery, unstable, something that happened in the gap between two seconds and cannot be reconstructed afterwards.

I am not trying to master what I see. I am trying to let it reach me before I have had time to protect myself from it.

Formal perfection closes the image in on itself. It says: there, it is done, it is resolved. An imperfect image remains open. It leaves something suspended. It does not know everything it contains.

That is the space of uncertainty I work in. Not despite the accidents. Because of them.

Articles à lire

• Photographer or Author? Why This Opposition Is a False Question
• Farewell Photography by Daido Moriyama: when photography stops trying to be beautiful
• Street photography doesn’t need to be spectacular
• Why does black-and-white photography minimize the background?
• “Street photographer” no longer means anything

I spent three weeks in Japan. I took 36,703 photographs.

Not in bursts. One frame at a time, every day, by instinct. The finger pressing the shutter before the mind has decided anything. It’s the only way I know how to work. Japan didn’t change that. It amplified it. There is something in this country that makes availability easier, as if the street itself were in constant motion and all you had to do was let yourself be carried by it.

I came back with 36,703 files and the feeling that I had lived three weeks at an abnormal speed. During the last days in Osaka, I wasn’t really sleeping anymore. I was shooting, coming back, looking at a few images without really seeing them, then going out again.

I’m 15% into the edit. For now, 250 remain.

250 out of 36,703 is less than 0.7%. That number should worry me. It doesn’t. It feels right. Maybe even still too generous.

Editing is not a process of selection. It is a process of forgetting. The vast majority of these images existed for one reason only: to keep me in a state of total availability for three weeks. They did their job during the act of photographing. They don’t have to survive afterwards.

What remains — the 250, and whatever will remain after the second pass, the third — are not the best photographs. They are the images that resist being forgotten. That is not the same thing. A good photograph can very well disappear in the edit because it says something I have already said, or something I no longer want to say. An imperfect image can remain because it carries a tension that nothing else in the series carries.

I don’t know how many will be left in the end. I’m not setting a number. I know photographers who give themselves quotas, who aim for a precise ratio. I understand the logic. It doesn’t fit me. A series does not have a quota. It has a necessity. When the edit is finished, I will know how many were needed.

For now, I’m 15% in, and 250 images are still standing. The remaining 85% are waiting for me.