Articles from Alex Coghe

The first mistake people make when photographing Día de Muertos is thinking they already understand it.

Photography has always occupied a curious position. It can be art, journalism, testimony, or obsession. But before any of that, it is memory made visible. And nowhere does that become more apparent than in the family photograph.

There is a particular kind of psychological illness that affects photographers after enough years behind a camera.

You feel it, or you don't. There's no middle ground. 

You know, there is a difference between a good photograph and one that stays. Not louder, not more dramatic, not even technically better. Just… harder to forget.

I realized at some point that most of the photographs I was making came from leaving too early — not physically, but mentally.

There's a particular kind of photographer who becomes visibly uncomfortable the moment Juergen Teller enters the conversation. You know the type. They can explain sensor readout speeds like nuclear engineers. They spend three weeks comparing corner sharpness at 400%. They speak about cameras the way Formula 1 mechanics speak about engines. Their hard drives are graveyards of technically flawless emptiness.

There are photographs that seem to exist entirely on their surface.

There is a kind of photography that pretends to be neutral. Flat surfaces, clean lines, ordinary spaces. Nothing dramatic, nothing loud, nothing that asks to be looked at twice. It's often dismissed as cold, detached, even empty. But that reading is too easy. What we call indifference is rarely indifference. It is a position.

Hunter S. Thompson is certainly one of my references — not because he ever cared about photography, but because he understood something most photographers avoid.

There's a strange misconception in street photography: that more is more. More chaos. More layers. More subjects. More "decisive moments."

Let's get this out of the way: this is not nostalgia.

There, I said it. Not bad. Not incompetent. Not untalented. Boring. And boring is far worse.

In photography, style is often discussed in terms of subject matter, color, or composition. Certainly important aspects to consider, but much less frequently do we talk about something equally decisive: focal length. Yet if you look closely at the history of urban landscape photography, focal length reveals itself as a kind of quiet grammar.

There's a sentence that keeps coming back in photography circles: street photography is dead.

Look around any expanding city today. Warehouses rise where fields stood five years ago. Housing developments stretch toward dry hills. Highways carve through fragile terrain. Data centers replace factories. The landscape is no longer something we visit. It is something we continuously build, erase, and rebuild. It is progress, they say.

Portraiture did not begin with photography. It began with control. Long before the camera, someone was already deciding how a face should be seen, remembered, and fixed in time. The portrait has always been an act of authority. Photography didn't change that; it just made the act faster and more invisible.