Love, in Passing

I rarely go out intending to photograph love.

Street photography does not quite work that way. You walk, you watch, and occasionally something unfolds in front of you before you have had time to give it a name. Something about the moment makes you stop, raise the camera, and hold on to it for a fraction longer than usual. You know why the moment matters; the photograph simply gives it a place to remain.

Looking back through photographs made over several years and across different cities, I realised how often love had quietly entered the frame.

We tend to associate “Love” with moments of certainty and declaration, with occasions that seem important enough to be remembered. But much of love exists outside those moments. It settles into ordinary life, often without ceremony, becoming visible only in the way people inhabit a moment together.

Photography is particularly sensitive to such things. A camera can hold on to a passing moment, giving something fleeting a little more permanence.

The street is full of brief encounters. The people I photograph remain strangers to me, their lives extending far beyond what enters the frame.

I do not need to know the whole story. Perhaps photographs are not meant to provide one. They preserve only an instant, leaving everything before and after it unresolved, and sometimes that is enough.

As a photographer, I am still an outsider. I can only respond to what is visible in that fraction of a second, without knowing what came before or what will follow, and that uncertainty is important.

A photograph cannot prove love. It can only record its gestures.

Those gestures can express tenderness, desire, familiarity, responsibility, attachment, or simply the comfort of another person's presence. Different relationships give it different forms, yet something persists beneath them: the willingness to let another person matter.

Maybe that's why its smallest expressions can feel so recognizable, even when the people themselves are strangers.

Perhaps this is also why love and cities have always shared such an enduring connection.

Cities are built around movement. People arrive, leave, cross paths, and disappear again. Thousands of private lives unfold beside one another, mostly unnoticed. Against that constant movement, intimacy creates its own temporary space. The surrounding city does not stop. Nothing extraordinary has happened to it, and yet, within the photograph, the scale of things can suddenly change. The architecture, the crowd, and the distance become secondary.

What seemed small in the physical world can become the center of the frame.

Paris has been photographed for more than a century as a symbol of romance, but love does not belong to Paris, nor to beautiful landscapes, perfect light, or famous monuments. Most of the time, it appears somewhere far less remarkable.

Over the years, I have begun to think that this is one of the pleasures of photographing people. You start by observing strangers, but observation occasionally becomes recognition. You see something belonging entirely to someone else and, for a fraction of a second, understand it without needing to know anything more about them.

You begin by looking at someone else's life.

And sometimes, quietly, you find something of your own.