Articles from Alex Coghe

There is a particular kind of expectation that follows you when you say you are in a country hosting a World Cup. It is not always spoken out loud, but it sits there in the background of conversations, in messages, in assumptions that come almost automatically, as if geography alone were enough to place you inside the flow of the event.

"How you make a picture is much easier to articulate than why you make a picture." I read this statement in a comment under one of my articles here on Fstoppers, and it inspired me to talk about this in more depth.

I've always wondered what goes through someone's mind when they decide to become a hater. Being a hater is a kind of job: you have to create fake accounts, which guarantee anonymity, and then, from those accounts, launch attacks against the object of your hatred.

In 2010, I made a decision that didn't make much sense on paper. I sold my Nikon gear and bought the first Olympus Pen E-P1.

There is a peculiar cult operating inside photography. You have seen them: the Autofocus Clergy.

Let's begin with the usual disclaimer:

I am not affiliated with Canon in any way. No sponsorships. No ambassador contract. No free gear raining from heaven. This is simply the perspective of a working photographer who has spent years using multiple systems professionally across documentary, editorial, portrait, and street photography.

Before anything else gets misread, I want to make one thing clear.

Years ago, Leica Camera AG hired me for an assignment worth roughly $10,000: the photos in this article are from that assignment that made the Leica X catalog in 2013. Today I have no working relationship with them, and I don't own any Leica cameras. I currently shoot Canon. I mention this only because Leica discussions tend to turn strangely ideological online, as if any nuance automatically comes from sponsorship or resentment. It doesn't. Sometimes it just comes from having been close enough to see how the myth behaves from the inside.

There's something people often misunderstand about photography workshops. They think workshops exist to improve technique.

Photography, in this social media era, has become exhausting.

There are moments when the street offers nothing back. No gesture, no alignment, no interruption — just space, air, a sky that refuses to hold anything except itself, a line cutting across almost by accident, a billboard drifting at the edge already dissolving into irrelevance. 

In photography, there's always a tension between control and immediacy. On one side, you have post-production, refinement, and the ability to shape an image long after it's been captured. On the other, there's the raw act of photographing in real time, where decisions are irreversible.

"Dogma 11" sits firmly in the second camp.

Street photography has become so codified that much of it now looks like photographers photographing other photographs. That sentence might sound unfair, perhaps even provocative. After all, we are living through a golden age of technical accessibility. Cameras have never been better, books are everywhere, and great work from every continent is just a swipe away. Knowledge that once took decades to acquire is now available in a 20-minute YouTube video. In the first years of the 2000s, we did not have anywhere near the access to information that we have today.

What photographing Jennifer Hermoso taught me about editorial photography, trust, and why magazine covers still matter.

Magazine covers still matter.

That may sound almost old-fashioned in a time dominated by feeds, algorithms, and endlessly scrolling images that disappear seconds after being seen. Yet the magazine cover remains a strange exception. It still carries weight, it still feels curated rather than accidental, and perhaps most importantly, it still says something about the image selected to represent an entire story.

Every few months the same narrative comes back: "The camera industry is dying." It sounds clean, dramatic, and easy to share. But the camera industry isn't really dying. It already lost 90% of its market and learned how to call it "stability." 

Photography, despite what the internet has spent the last fifteen years trying to convince you, is not about photography. It is about life. Photography is simply what happens when life collides with awareness. The camera is not the source. It is the witness.

Acapulco at night feels less like a city and more like a stage set designed by a casino architect having a mild nervous breakdown. Palm trees multiply in every direction. Floodlights blast the sand with the subtlety of a prison yard. Massive hotels rise from the coastline pretending time still moves the way it did decades ago, as if glamour could survive indefinitely through architecture and denial alone.

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.