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The Street Photographer Rights In Italy. The Leaflet
Here is an easy-to-carry A4 leaflet to be used in case you are confronted by a law enforcement agent of officer that question your Street Photography activity. Legal issues apart, please remember to always be polite and to help the officer not to look goofy or ignorant (as he actually would) in front of the public. Q. Does taking people’s photography in public spaces infringes sec. 615 bis of the criminal code? A. NO. Under the Corte di cassazione ruling n. 47165/2010 outdoor there is no reasonable privacy expectation, as there is no reasonable privacy expectation in case of tacit – while non equivocal – withdrawal of this right, as…
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Just Another Times Square View
I made this photograph in 2000, standing in Times Square with a Canon film camera loaded with Portra 160. It was a different city then—louder in some ways, rougher at the edges, less polished than the LED-saturated spectacle it would later become. What interested me was not the chaos itself, but the uneasy coexistence between permanence and transience: stone and steel on one side, light and commerce on the other. The composition is deliberately vertical, almost architectural. The frame stacks elements upward rather than outward: the dense mass of midtown buildings rises on the left, while the illuminated billboards dominate the right. The Budweiser sign acts as a visual anchor,…
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Mulberry Street, When Benito II Was Still There…
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Arriba El Mexico!
I took this photograph from the passenger seat of a cab, during that suspended moment when traffic stalls and the city becomes a collage of reflections and colour. The small felt figure hanging from the mirror caught my attention first—bright, slightly absurd, and placed without irony. The tiny sombrero, the stitched flag, the green felt body: a souvenir turned mascot, living in the blurred space between décor and identity. What interested me was how this small object commanded the frame. The background—city lights, signage, fragments of buildings—exists only as colour fields and soft shapes. The mirror picks up hints of the driver, the interior, and the street behind us, but…
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A Zeppelin in The New York Sky
New York, 2000. I remember looking up from the crowded streets and seeing it — a zeppelin, drifting slowly above the jagged canyon of Midtown’s architecture. In that moment, it felt like something out of a different century had quietly slipped into ours. I didn’t have much time to think; I just framed, focused, and released the shutter. The composition is as much about absence as it is about presence. The airship is small, almost swallowed by the negative space of the sky, yet the buildings act as monumental bookends, forcing the eye toward the centre. The turquoise cast of the glass facade on the left and the warm brick…
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The Spanish Sense of Flesh – 2
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Nightlife in Bruxelles
You can smell it before you hear it — the warm hum of beer, laughter, breath crystallising in the cold. This photo, taken in the backstreets of Brussels, isn’t a postcard of nightlife. It’s a sketch. Loose, fast, half in shadow. Which makes it all the more true. Cafés and pubs stack signs on top of each other like citations — Delirium, Floris Bar, Café, Pub, Garden. Every name lit, every door half-open, promising exactly what you need at this hour. But the terrace tables are empty, stacked in rows like punctuation marks between stories. It’s too cold to sit. Too late to be still. The people gather where the…
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The Spanish Sense of Flesh – 1
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Though Choice
It doesn’t take much to make your day happy.
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Zebra Crossing, Again…
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Square Three
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What Are You Looking At?
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Square Two
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Square One
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Now You See It…Street Juggler at a Red Light in Barcelona
Caught this just as the traffic paused. The juggler—or maybe illusionist—stepped onto the zebra crossing like it was a stage, pulling a contact juggling sphere from his pocket with the same ease most reach for a cigarette. No microphone, no music, no hat on the ground. Just confidence, and a tight, silent routine aimed at no one and everyone. I shot from slightly above, which flattened the scene into layers: the motorcyclist on the left, the car breaking the frame in front, and the performer, suspended mid-gesture. The composition benefits from the crosswalk marks, which slice the image horizontally and echo the performer’s stance. It’s geometry meeting theatre. Technically, this…
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No, You Don’t Need To Change Your Glasses
This was intentional. No missed autofocus, no technical glitch. I set the lens manually, focused nowhere, and waited for someone to walk into the blur. He did—carrying two bright yellow bags, dressed sharply but casually, perfectly unremarkable in the sharp world we expect from street photography. The concept was simple: remove clarity and see what remains. What I found was structure. Colour. Gait. Gesture. A kind of abstraction that doesn’t erase the human, just detaches it from identification. No face. No detail. But still a presence. Technically, the image defies critique by design. It isn’t sharp—at all. The highlights push into soft bloom, the street dissolves into haze, and the…
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Lost In Barcelona’s Beauty
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Catching the Tube in Paris
Street photography often thrives on the interplay between the static and the fleeting, and this frame from Paris captures that balance with precision. The scene is anchored by the familiar visual cues of the city — the “METRO” sign, the Haussmannian stonework, the ordered chaos of bicycles, cafés, and traffic further down the street. These elements provide a stable architectural stage against which the human drama plays out. The blurred stride of the man crossing the frame injects the shot with movement and urgency, the sort of kinetic energy that turns a documentary image into a narrative one. His presence, slightly soft due to motion blur, contrasts sharply with the…
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Just In Case
Should you have some doubt, by reading the banner you can’t be mistaken. Clarity can be a virtue, even when it delivers its message with the blunt weight of inevitability. Here, a simple blue sign announces the location of the mortuary—not just once, but three times, in three languages. French, Latin, English. No ambiguity, no chance of misunderstanding. Just in case. The composition frames the sign against the muted greys of the surrounding architecture, a deliberate choice to strip away distractions. The words stand out, rendered in stark, functional typography, their neutrality belying the emotional weight of the place they indicate. Photography thrives on layers of meaning, and here the…
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Ni État Ni Patron
Brussels. A quiet wall, a passing car, and a message that’s louder than both. The slogan is old—older than the paint used to scrawl it—Ni État Ni Patron. No state, no boss. A phrase that echoes from factories, barricades, pamphlets. And now, here it is again, on a half-covered stretch of rendered concrete. It wasn’t written to decorate. It was written to remain. The graffiti stands out not just for what it says, but for where it says it: in the middle of a freshly patched rectangle, painted over what was clearly another message before it. The wall becomes a palimpsest—layers of resistance, erasure, and return. Below it, a car…
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Poetry Still Survives
Blessed be the city, where somebody can earn his day, by selling poetry.
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The El Prat’s Lounge
Airport lounges often exist in a strange, liminal space — neither entirely connected to the bustle of the terminal nor completely detached from it. This photograph captures that in-between feeling with an almost still-life precision. The beige armchairs, glass coffee table, and neatly placed newspaper (“La Vanguardia”) suggest a space curated for calm, yet one can sense the transient nature of those who pass through. The composition is deliberate and symmetrical, the sofa centred with the vase of artificial flowers acting as the visual anchor. The choice to place the glass table in the foreground introduces depth and framing, its reflections adding subtle complexity without pulling attention from the central…
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Small Talk in Las Ramblas
I took this photo in Barcelona, where conversation isn’t background noise but part of the architecture. Las Ramblas is never quiet, never empty—always a current of movement, commerce, and human theatre. Yet in this frame, the flow is briefly suspended by a gesture: one man leaning down to greet another, while a third man stands as witness, folded newspaper in hand, arms set in a subtle brace of familiarity. The scene unfolds naturally, without prompting. I wasn’t aiming for perfection but presence—being there, camera in hand, when a moment coalesced. Compositionally, it’s informal yet balanced. The figures form a loose triangle, anchoring the shot while the rest of the world…
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Siamese Boats On the Seine River
Two barges, TEMPO and VESTA, lashed together as if bound by some unspoken pact, making their way up the Seine. Seen from above, their pairing creates a symmetry that is almost architectural. The way their bows slice the water in unison feels more like choreography than navigation. The shot was taken from a bridge, directly aligned with their approach, which allowed me to keep both vessels centred and parallel in the frame. That alignment is crucial — a slight offset would have made the composition feel off-balance. Here, the geometry holds everything together: two hulls, two decks, two names, and a doubling of anchor motifs. The light was soft but…
