Articles from Alex Coghe

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.