Articles from Alex Coghe

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. 

At first, you are happy simply because you captured something.A face. A gesture. A decent exposure. A dog crossing the street with good timing.

You feel alive. Photography feels infinite.

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.

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

You look at them and everything is already there. A trailer, parked on a patch of dirt. A road cutting the foreground. Mountains in the distance. A sky that holds the whole thing together without insisting too much. And across the side of the trailer, a name stretched in bold letters, impossible to ignore.

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." 

But what if the real power lies somewhere else entirely? What if the strongest images are the ones that almost don't exist? And what if the format itself is the first, decisive cut?

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

I'm not trying to "bring back" anything, especially a smartphone. I'm not interested in retro aesthetics for the sake of it. And I'm definitely not here to argue that older technology is somehow superior.

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

Bad photography can at least be entertaining. It can crash through the wall drunk at two in the morning, bleeding from the forehead, demanding another round. Boring photography arrives exactly on time, wipes its shoes at the door, and asks where you keep the coasters.

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. 

Most people say it with nostalgia. Some say it with frustration. A few say it like a provocation.

They're all wrong. And right.

Street photography isn't dead because people stopped doing it. It's "dead" because everyone started.

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.