Finding
Coordinates

Let's try. The first, introductory chapter is called “The Crossroads.” I'll show you an intersection in Athens, Greece, which may offer some idea of what street photography is. I chose a single location, one intersection in the middle of noisy Athens. Look at how you can explore a tiny patch of ground, a full 360 degrees, in about thirty minutes. I made these pictures at sunset. For anyone wanting to try this genre—or already practising it—it's a wonderful exercise: go outside and choose a place. You don't need some grand concept. Just go there, look at the sun, look at a tree, look at a pedestrian crossing; stand still and be silent. At some point you'll begin to feel the space, and it will start suggesting what to do. Perhaps you'll want to press the shutter and preserve something in memory.

What do we see in this photograph? A mannequin by a traffic light, a little shop, and to the right two drug users selling heroin; in the distance—I don't know how clearly you can see it—some guys are injecting drugs. They really were. [Editor's note in the original publication: this does not endorse drug use.] Walking through a big city, you miss all this because of the noise, the cars, everything going on. But once you stop, you begin to notice the multiple layers of life. You can photograph them and spend a long time examining them. Invisible doors open.

Exactly. Blow-Up is probably my favourite film, by the way. It always inspires me to keep moving forward. Here the camera is facing 180 degrees away from the previous scene, towards the hands painted on a building. A man sits in his car waiting for someone. Light, shadow, contrast.

First of all, it left a deep impression on me. I really felt connected to it. There are places where you stop and the pieces of a puzzle seem to fit together: you've arrived at the right point. This one was fascinating, both for a filmmaker and simply for someone who enjoys discovering unobvious places in different cities. It was entirely outside the tourist districts. Everyone warned me against going there, saying there was nothing to find. But beauty isn't always where it's sold to you on advertising covers.

I have a useful principle: when you arrive somewhere unfamiliar, a city you've never visited, switch into cat mode.

Cat mode. Get as far from the tourist centre as possible. Dissolve into local neighbourhoods where there are no hotels or shops for visitors, and start exploring the city, moving in a circle, perhaps slowly approaching the centre. You'll learn more about the people and the history of the place, and find scattered gems that aren't immediately visible. Here there's a man, an anarchist symbol and two motorcycles. A strange frame, actually. Only now have I realised that the motorcycles are on the left, the car is on the right, and there's a person between them.

Yes, but it wasn't deliberate. Let me make one small point: the images you're seeing haven't been processed, colour-graded or cropped. They're straight from the sensor.

Once you start altering the frame, perhaps you're already moving towards staged photography, whereas street photography implies pure documentary observation. It's like taking a drink of water. You can add salt, or sugar and lemon, or you can simply drink the water. I think street photographs are best left alone. Maybe adjust the contrast slightly. But that's like changing the temperature of the water, not its taste. Here the man has a bag.

My working radius was about a hundred metres.

I shifted a little, yes. I followed the sun. Probably the greatest ally in street photography is the sun. Once you learn to read it, it tells you where to stand, where the contrast will be good, and where reflections and highlights will fall.

Let me put it another way: knowing where the sun rises and sets in a city, knowing its path. If you know the sun's path, you can anticipate how an object will appear anywhere, how the light will spread and how the shadows will fall. That's part of preparing for the process. You can spend a month thinking about an atmosphere you want to capture: “Ah, in a month the sun will be in just that position. I'll go there.” There's another important question, one that interests street photographers around the world. I'll come back to it at the end: how do you interact with the people who become the subjects of your pictures? Because the moment you ask them for permission, the photograph often falls apart and becomes a dull posed image. But catching a moment when no one has noticed that you're photographing them… Here, for instance, two tough-looking guys are walking past. I doubt they'd be happy to know I was taking their picture. You have to blend into your surroundings, conceal yourself like a leopard in patches of sunlight, so you can press the shutter and nobody even understands what's happened. After that click, you may meet the person's gaze, and the situation can develop in two ways. Either they're so absorbed in their thoughts that they walk straight past you, and you make another ten or fifteen pictures. Well, that's too many—say five. You enjoy the process, walk beside them, bring the camera almost right up to their face, and they still won't see you because they're in their own world. Or the opposite happens: you strike up an interesting acquaintance and begin making a different kind of photographs.

That's when you need the ability to camouflage yourself. Don't photograph ostentatiously; do it modestly and blend into the surroundings as much as possible. Become a kind of ninja. You don't even have to wear inconspicuous clothes. You might be dressed very brightly, but the moment you relax and accept that you're part of the space around you—imagine there's a beautiful stone with an inscription on it, and that you are that stone—people pick up on that attitude and stop noticing you. It really works. With your courier I'd imagine I was a parcel locker or a car. It works! This is probably the last image in the series: a man who seems to be flying. I find it very successful. A strange frame, but I love it. It's the culmination of the sequence.

It is out of focus, yes, and I did that deliberately.

Of course.

Why should it be bad?

Sometimes I find it interesting to look at pictures that are out of focus, particularly in the foreground. I can see well at a distance, while other people see well up close but less well far away. You're almost exchanging roles. You can look at the world differently, shift your attention to the background, bring it closer, study it. The person in the foreground may be out of focus, but they're living their own life. It's like the conventional belief that the horizon must always be level. Why should it be level when the Earth is round? It's round, so surely there must be some curvature to it. These are philosophical arguments, really.

Yes, the emotional element. Street photography has no laws and no dogmas. It's pure freedom, and absolutely nobody can tell you how it must be done.

You still have an artist's inner sense of proportion and harmony. I don't like the phrase “golden ratio,” but perhaps even that plays a part. And you need basic photographic skills. Simply buying a camera and going out to take street pictures on the first or second day probably won't do. It's a craft, a particular kind of labour and devotion, raising you year after year towards whatever height you want to reach.

It's my rule. A lot of contemporary photographers, Japanese, Korean, American, use it almost as a signature. But it gives you discipline. You don't waste time in post-production: you make the image as it was, without distorting reality.

The second chapter is called “Chaos.”

Perhaps, having passed through a first stage—or even starting directly with chaos—every photographer at some point, travelling around the world or simply walking through their own city, finds themselves immersed in it. Chaos isn't so much the behaviour of the people around you as the impact of architecture, the rhythms of the city and the light. Organising chaos into a concise work is one of the aims of street photography. I've gathered some pictures that I hope will help explain this. It's difficult to put into words, but if you have some familiarity with street photography—and these days it's easy enough to develop that by looking online—you can begin to understand. Take this photograph, which I made in Hamburg in 2017: Syrian refugees at Hamburg railway station. A young woman is looking at a phone that perhaps she received as aid only the day before. Despite the apparent chaos, an invisible structure governs the picture. There are so many layers, so many planes, revealing an incredible depth of space. That's part of the magic of street photography: going out on a photographic hunt and coming home with something like this.

It's like a glowing halo above her head, a visual accent. You could perhaps compare this picture to a certain kind of graffiti: an artist makes a three-dimensional image on a wall that can only be perceived from one specific angle. Step to the left or right and the image falls apart. Move into the correct point of parallax, and suddenly it's complete. Street photography may be a search for that golden moment, that precise point where the space comes together and the picture is born. Cartier-Bresson was a genius at this, a pioneer of street photography. His photographs are examples of those golden moments discovered.

Yes. I started with chaos because to reach the cosmos you have to pass through chaos. You can wander through it all day. And if you find just one such picture, when the space aligns and you reach the intersection of those coordinates, that's when the cosmos begins.

Here is the embankment in Rostov-on-Don, in the evening: young men and women. Another frame that came together.

Here's something interesting too: a flat-looking building, many windows, children, football, a green shirt. Pictures like this make you look closely. Once you've taken one, you want to come nearer, make close-ups of the boys and examine everything in greater detail. It's the beginning of a dialogue.

And this is Moscow chaos, in the Maroseyka area, from two years ago. I wonder what became of them. None of these guys was posing.

I immersed myself among these young people. They were having fun, drinking a little. I made the picture, and only when I got home did I notice that one of them seemed to have no eyes, as if they'd disappeared. A frightening picture. We can move on to the next chapter, “In Search of Light.”

The search for light, yes.

Light isn't only visible beams of light—although, of course, everything we're seeing is visible light. Light reflected from the sky by a river is light too.

The railings, yes. It's rhythm.

Yes. This is a sort of opening image, to show that there is this kind of light. For me, this frame is light. And then there is this kind. Perhaps you were expecting the dramatic kind, black and white, contrast. Searching for light is probably the most important thing in life as well. You move towards the light. Photography helps you distinguish clearly between black and white, light and darkness. And that emergence into light can be like a magical elixir. You make a good photograph, look at it and think, “Yes. That's light.”

It is street photography, but it's architecture. It's inside a structure, but not really inside a building—it's under an arch, beneath a staircase.

But street photography doesn't have a strictly defined genre. You could probably even make a picture in a nightclub and call it street photography. The main thing is to believe that it is. It's a matter of faith.

Yes. Here is another search for light.

No, that's the natural contrast. All these files are original JPEGs, without processing or colour correction.

This camera is a level above an iPhone, but the important thing is to be ready before you make the picture. You need to learn to “read time” at least two or three minutes into the future. You can see that in the previous picture. A person appeared in the frame and needed literally five seconds to come around the corner. When I prepared the composition, I didn't know anyone would appear. I wasn't waiting for anyone. I liked the geometry of the space and set the camera so it would look more or less like this. Then the person appeared. But that's intuition, and intuition can be trained: the anticipation of a frame, of a moment. For a street photographer it's always important to be one step ahead. To play reality forward by two minutes—that's excellent. By one minute—that's good. It's a way of developing intuition.

Probably my filmmaking life, yes. I also use this as a kind of continuous exercise.

Anti-Instagram, yes. The banned one. We can move on to the next section.

It's a premonition of the future.

To finish the subject of light, there's something important about anticipation. It's a good skill to enter a space already prepared for the frame. Ten or fifteen minutes earlier you've set yourself up, taken a test photograph and worked out what the image is going to look like. Then you don't need to change the aperture, shutter speed or sensitivity. The camera is ready, and you can press the shutter without even looking.

But in automatic mode you can't achieve this result, because the camera doesn't know whether to expose for the foreground, the background or something in between, as in this picture. Your mind is constantly working through these decisions. It's training the neurons.

Laziness! That could be a chapter of its own, because laziness is street photography's greatest enemy. Too lazy to get up and go out shooting, too lazy to walk over there or over here. So often you imagine the moments in your head but are too lazy to photograph them. There can be no room for that. Now, the fourth chapter: “Contemplating Space.”

Coming back to our opening question—what should we photograph? Anything at all. For instance, I like triangles as a geometric form, so I decided to look for triangles in the world around me. Here I found a triangular tree. That's a perfectly workable subject: you go out and photograph triangles in the form of pink trees. And I was lucky, because a woman also stopped to contemplate the triangle, and the picture came together.

Yes, but that's anticipation again. I started photographing the triangle, made one frame, and then the woman walked past. I thought, “That's it, press the shutter.” Here's another triangle.

“Contemplating Space.” Since there are no dogmas in street photography, everyone chooses their own genre and vision, projecting their inner search into their pictures. That's where its value lies.

I made one frame. There's one frame on the memory card.

No, I wasn't waiting. My principle is that I don't wait for anything. I walk. I keep moving, collecting whatever I encounter along the way. Waiting deliberately is like sitting in a forest waiting for a mushroom to grow. It may never grow. Or it may grow, but turn out to be a different kind. In street photography it's better to keep moving too.

I see him standing there as I'm walking past, and realise that the other young man is going to move out towards the small pier. I understand that if I walk another fifteen metres, he'll reach exactly the right point and I can make the picture. That's anticipation again. It isn't staged or patiently waited for; it's spontaneous.

More than that, I think. Maybe fifty metres. I was walking from right to left.

I needed a triangle, yes. And I got one, so I'm happy. There's a composition involving the people, and a second, truncated triangle on the right. Two triangles, essentially.

They're two friends, and you can't separate friends.

All right, then. We won't retouch them. We'll leave both friends in.

And they are fishermen. Here's another image connected to the search for light: a person looking towards the light.

Yes, that's one vertical.

Shall we go back to the horizontal pictures? It really doesn't show very well on this screen.

It's a shame the projector can't do this next one justice. It's an extraordinary moment: a bus stop in Turkey, around midnight. A woman in pink appears from the left, while a man in black approaches from the right. She embraces him, and they kiss. I managed to make the picture. To me it's an excellent example of street photography—a moment falling into place that you could neither predict nor stage.

Not at all. We have a wonderful compatriot, Yuri Rost, who combines photography with writing. For him, the description is as valuable as—or more valuable than—the photograph itself. You can do that. You could write a short story, even a little novella, about every photograph.

There are online communities. There's Flickr, one of the main meeting places for street photographers from around the world. There are private Japanese groups where photographs are exchanged by invitation, closed clubs. There are plenty of platforms; you choose whichever you like. Exhibitions are possible, but expensive. There are so many pictures, printing costs a lot, and it's unclear how to find a venue for this genre, how to make money from it—or whether you even should. Here's another photograph: four girls and water. And here's a clear example of colours interacting. At night a shawarma stall, or perhaps a sweets kiosk, is lit up. On the left there's a dominant red. And suddenly a girl in red appears, and the frame becomes complete.

I usually come back from a walk with three or four frames.

Three or four successful frames per walk. You might take a hundred pictures, but there has to be some discipline. Even though we now have practically unlimited storage—memory cards of 128 or 256 gigabytes, seemingly endless capacity—you still need an internal stop. You need to respect the shutter, and above all respect yourself. Don't photograph absolutely everything in the hope something will turn out. Think, and make the picture.

I took three frames. This is the third. I looked at it and knew it had worked. I understood she was about to enter the composition, that there might be a good phase of movement—one, two, three—and a complete compositional structure appeared. Now this photograph is of a fountain. There's a little town in Italy called Pennabilli, where Tonino Guerra spent the last fifteen or twenty years of his life. We visited him once.

A good book. I recommend it. This fountain is in the main square, and they'd brought a whole crowd of children there. The fountain was covered with children and adults, and the steps were full of people and photographers. I wanted to make a picture, but there was simply too much chaos, too much bustle, and the location didn't feel right. Then, for perhaps five seconds, everyone dispersed. Only a little boy drinking from the tap and a girl who'd already had her drink and was leaving remained. A completely unstaged frame, very pure, in daylight. And here's another triangle: a boy, a cat and his mother. I was walking along and first saw the boy through a gap, then the cat—or maybe I saw the cat first. Then the mother entered the scene. Click! And there was the photograph.

No, not always. Street photography costs a lot of energy, at least for me. After a couple of sessions, I need about a week to recover.

Yes, emotionally, and in terms of neural connections. You're continually imagining how things might come together. It's like sport. Not everyone could do that every day, I think. Though perhaps I'm wrong. If there's someone who makes several powerful pictures every day…

I might compare it to chess. Street photography is very much like chess: there are combinations and you begin analysing them. But your brain can't analyse endlessly. Sometimes it needs a rest. This picture is from St Petersburg: a girl in red on a freezing day. An absolutely ordinary day, with many cars and passers-by. And then, for one second, the girl was alone, and I felt it was time to press the shutter. This next one was from two years ago, during a tremendous snowfall that buried Moscow. It was wonderful to wander around.

They're running! Two runners, minus twenty degrees, and two runners. And there are little lanterns or Christmas ornaments hanging on this dried-up linden tree.

On the way to the bell tower, yes. A very strange photograph, but pure street photography. Now this frame leads us towards the final chapter. I'd call it “Ethics”: how to interact with people. I've touched on this already, but now I want to explain a little more about how to avoid being seen. A young woman was walking along, minding her own business. I spotted the pink of her coat from a distance and was drawn to it, so I started approaching her. I knew I had to act quickly. I made about five pictures while walking towards her at an angle…

What mattered to me was not triggering an emotional reaction. If she noticed me, she'd feel self-conscious or turn away, and the picture would fall apart. So the next section is “Ethics”: the ethics of taking photographs, how to become invisible, and—what the lecture itself is called—how to dissolve into space.

No, he's gesturing to his friend. This is Rostov-on-Don.

You recognised it?

Taganrog is a wonderful city.

No, the man is posing for his rather rough-looking friend who was standing behind my camera. I realised the two of them were having some sort of conversation, and I started to move around with the camera. I hid behind his friend and peered out from over his shoulder for a moment.

Yes, behind him. It's like an over-the-shoulder reverse shot in cinema, the sort of shot-reverse-shot you make with two cameras. That's how I got this picture. If you look closely, his gaze is directed slightly to the right of the frame.

And here is a Moscow trolleybus—or perhaps a bus. There's this girl who looks as though she's stepped out of an icon. A saint. Sometimes, and you can catch this in public transport, time slows down and people become still. You can calmly photograph portraits like this for a minute. It isn't really a portrait; it's more of a wide shot. But public transport is full of such scenes.

No.

That brings us back to light. She is light; they are dark. Darkness on both sides, light in the centre, and we're moving towards the light. They don't bother me. Perhaps I'm inventing a rationale now, putting artificial thoughts onto the image, but instinctively I don't want to cut anything away.

Here's another example of street photography on public transport: a sleeping man. I must admit I was a little dishonest. It's not especially good to photograph people while they sleep, but I loved the character and the pastel tones. I think he'll forgive me. A good man.

And here's a flight attendant on a plane. When you fly a lot, sometimes you really want to photograph flight attendants. They're wonderful. I spent a long time wondering whether to ask her to sit for a portrait, then decided it would be better to take a candid shot. Here she stands, looking blissfully up towards the sky. This was on a flight from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk.

Here's another interaction.

She's not looking into the camera.

She's not looking at the lens. Enlarge the image and you'll see she's looking just above it. She's lost in thought, inside herself. You can catch moments like this and work with them. You can calmly take this picture without disturbing the person at all. The key is to find that thread, that connection.

And here this man also appears to be looking at the camera. He's thinking and smoking during his five-minute lunch break; it's as if time has stopped. People are passing, things are happening, but he doesn't see you. You dissolve into the scene, and the opportunity to make this kind of image appears.

This one is from Georgia: a Georgian priest. He saw that I was photographing him, but the moment felt so natural that after I took the picture he simply looked at me and walked on. Neither of us felt any need to question the situation. It's a good example of street photography working: you photograph delicately, silently wish each other well, and go your separate ways. Sometimes you wonder how to give the person the photograph. Perhaps one day it will find its way to him…

And this is a man in a café, a rather theatrical-looking character, gazing off to the side. A completely documentary frame.

This next one is staged, in a sense. Two children were playing in a playground. I began photographing them, and one came up to me. I had a feeling he wanted me to take his picture. I asked, “Do you mind if I take a shot?” He said, “No problem at all!” He looked towards the camera and I pressed the shutter. It's another example of how you can ask permission and the person remains relaxed, isn't really posing, just enjoys being photographed. That can work perfectly in street photography. Such moments are rare, when the place, the action, the light, the textures and the architecture come together, and the people themselves cooperate and bring something extra to the frame. It's lucky to catch moments like that.

I'd like to end the lecture with this photograph. A little girl and her mother were sitting at a bus stop. They were refugees. I'm a little ashamed of this picture, because after I took it I realised it wasn't entirely ethical. They looked so unhappy, and the girl looked towards the camera through this hole in the bus-stop shelter. The image caught hold of me, and I decided to make it and keep it as a memory. I don't know where they are now. I hope they're well.

Thank you for the question. I actually missed an important point about ethics. Yes, I have a couple of taboos that I try not to break. I believe you shouldn't photograph homeless people, people who have no home. You shouldn't photograph people who are suffering or whom you aren't able to help. It's all too easy to approach someone with no home, someone who's ill or in a very difficult situation, and start photographing them when they're defenceless. I don't believe you should photograph defenceless people. You should help them. But that's my approach. Photograph strong people—people who can stand up to you, who can tell you to stop. Photograph beautiful people; convey the light. And where help is needed, offer help instead.

It's not a principle so much as an ethical standard I try to observe. I understood it back in 1999, when I was preparing my admissions portfolio for VGIK and attending photography classes. There were many unfortunate people on the streets of Moscow, and everybody tried to photograph them.

Yes, and to me it's exploitation. I don't think it has anything to do with street photography. If you look at the work of the great street photographers—and there are too many names to list here—they don't use that subject in this way.

I like Alex Webb—although sometimes I have a feeling that his photographs are staged. I should meet him one day and ask him about that. Cartier-Bresson and Rodchenko too.

The foundations, yes, and the foundations are the classics. Beyond that, there's a wonderful website, Magnum Photos. There are so many photographers there. Look, enjoy, learn and be inspired. Every one has a distinct style. I also love digging through Japanese photography communities, where there are many unknown people making extraordinary masterpieces of street photography. They're already far out in the cosmos. But street photography is shaped by the space in which you make it. Having a harmonious environment matters enormously. If a place is unhappy, deprived, saturated with pain, then good street photography is difficult. That creates a kind of social responsibility: cultivate the environment, change the world around you for the better, towards goodness and light, and street photography will follow. There are photographers in Russia, of course, but we're not yet at the level of the Japanese.

Well, there are nuances. He did adjust the tones, but he didn't crop, yes.

Actually, triangles run through all my work. I deliberately incorporate them. I like them. They're like the keystone in architecture: that small central stone on which the enormous vault of a cathedral depends. For me, the triangle is the shape that makes it possible to organise the space inside the frame.

My favourite used to be the 35mm. I shot with a 35 for many years, then discovered the 28mm and realised it loses nothing to the 35. About half the work you've seen here was shot on a 28, the rest more or less on a 35. And when I really want a treat, something to savour and examine in detail, I love a 90mm lens.

You can make street photographs on a 300mm if you like. There are no limits—shoot with whatever you want. But for me, the greatest energy and dynamism come through to the viewer between 28 and 35mm. That's the rule as I see it. A 21mm works, but it can become excessively expressive, demanding too much attention. Twenty-eight to thirty-five millimetres—that's pure street photography.

I'm not an art historian, but I'll try to work through it. Photojournalism is usually an assignment. You're given a task, and you go out to complete it. You're already working inside a brief, within a script written by an editor. So reportage isn't street photography in that sense. But street photography can become reportage, because you might find yourself in a situation that reveals events and eventually becomes an important historical document.

Probably by analysing their own work. If you make a picture and aren't satisfied with it, that's a sign you're growing: you need to keep looking for your next point of development. If you can do ten pull-ups, do eleven. If you can do fifteen, do sixteen. At some point you'll reach a peak where even one more step becomes very difficult, and progress follows something like a logarithmic curve. If you improve quickly, one day you'll look at your old photographs and say, “Wow! I've already grown. I've reached that next step!” Then you'll move beyond it, little by little. That's life, and the important thing is never to stop.

Style emerges from your own path and your freedom, because freedom gives birth to style. When you don't depend on anyone, when you're free inside yourself, your own style will come. You'll develop it. That's how people work. Good luck!