Articles from Alex Coghe

Travel photography is having an identity crisis. Not because cameras have become worse, not because destinations have become less interesting, and certainly not because photographers have stopped traveling. The problem is something else: too much travel photography today feels interchangeable.

I've studied the exotic and colonialist gaze in photography extensively. I began to develop an interest in it through some texts I read in the Mexican magazine Cuartoscuro, and then I delved deeper into it through a book a friend gave me.

A few years ago, I got a friend request I didn't expect. It came from Efrem Raimondi. If you're not familiar with the name, you've almost certainly seen his work without knowing it.

A comment on an old post accused me of photographing only women, and rather than let it sit, I want to take it apart, because the accusation says far more about how people look at images than about how I make them. What follows is less a defense than an explanation of what I am actually doing when I raise the camera, and why the subject is rarely the point.

The visual is cultivated through visions. It may seem like an oxymoron, but we often tend to overlook the importance of nurturing our ability to see. The perception of experience also stems from our cultural background. And if it's missing, we often fail to understand how to photograph.

The tragedy is believing that loving cameras is the same thing as loving photography. 

One of the greatest surprises photography has given me has almost never arrived while I was out walking with a camera. It has arrived afterward, sometimes the same evening, sometimes months later, when I have found myself looking at a photograph I believed I already understood and suddenly noticed something that had escaped me completely while I was making it.

First there was the word, from a creative point of view, but in terms of reasoning, first there was light. Image and content travel within it. If light travels faster than sound, its content is also received much earlier. If, before speaking, we communicate through sight, we must restructure the way we learn.

There's a camera on my shelf that changed how I look at the world: a Yashica Electro 35 GSN. Heavy. Honest. A rangefinder that asked nothing of me except to slow down and pay attention. The 45mm lens acts as a "normal" or standard field of view on the camera's 35mm full frame format, allowing you to make everything from street photography to portraits.

There is a certain kind of photography that does not begin with a plan, a map, or even a clear idea of what you are looking for. It begins the moment you realize you are already lost and you decide, consciously or not, to keep going anyway.

There is a peculiar type of confidence that thrives in photography today, and it usually arrives wearing the expression of a man who has just discovered absolute truth through a combination of autofocus charts, affiliate links, and an aggressively edited YouTube thumbnail. He speaks with conviction about lenses as if discussing racehorses or religious doctrine. One focal length is cinematic.

There are cameras people buy because they are new, and cameras people keep because they matter.

I've never been able to decide whether writing is more demanding than photography or the other way around. Every few years I convince myself I have the answer, and then something happens that proves me wrong.

One of the strangest things about photography isn't the endless debate over cameras, editing software, or artificial intelligence. It is the quiet assumption that mastering one photographic discipline somehow grants authority over every other one.

There is a particular kind of confidence that only exists on the internet. You have probably encountered it if you've ever published a photograph, written an article, uploaded a YouTube video or, for that matter, dared to have an opinion in public.

There's a fairly common way to begin a piece about two photographers: describing when they met. This isn't that kind of story. Between Luigi Ghirri and Claude Nori, there's no iconic image shared together, no textbook foundational episode, not even the certainty that they ever needed to truly define their relationship.

Most likely, this won't matter to many people, but I'm writing it and proposing it anyway, also because I'm convinced that there's only one person who will be interested in this piece about an antiquated setup that, in my opinion, still works great today. At least it works for me.

So I finally bought a lens that I really wanted: the Canon EF 40mm f/2.8 STM. 

One of the arguments I hear most often against street photography has very little to do with photography itself.

"If you're going to photograph someone, why not just talk to them?"

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.

It was slow. It was imperfect. Autofocus... lol. It didn't impress anyone who cared about specs.

But it changed how I worked in the street.

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.

And after all that?

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

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.

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

Magazine covers still matter.

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.

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