So I Realized I Am a Hunter

For many years, I told myself I was simply a street photographer

Someone who walks, observes, waits. Someone who blends into the crowd and listens to the rhythm of the city. Someone who collects fragments of life with a camera, like a quiet archivist of the everyday.

That was the story I liked to tell myself.

Then one day, without drama and without noise, I understood something else. I am not only an observer. I am not only a witness. I am a hunter.

Not in the violent sense. Not in the predatory caricature that photography, and street photography in particular, sometimes inherits. But in a deeper, older, almost ancestral way. The kind of hunter who moves through territory reading invisible signs. The kind who feels when something is about to happen before it happens. The kind who is guided not by logic, but by instinct.

And once I saw it, I could no longer unsee it.

Street photography stopped being just an act. It became a state of being.

Hunter, No Fisher

Some time ago, someone made a simple but powerful distinction: street photographers can be divided into two categories — fishers and hunters.

At first, it sounded like just another clever metaphor. One of those phrases that circulates in photography circles, gets quoted, reposted, and slowly loses its weight. But the more I thought about it, the more it began to feel uncomfortably precise.

Fishers wait. They cast their line into the flow of the street and let life come to them. They choose a spot, build a frame, and trust the patience of repetition. They believe in rhythm, in accumulation, in the poetry of chance.

Hunters move. They read the territory. They follow instinct. They stalk moments before they exist and intercept them as they emerge from the chaos. They don’t wait for the street to offer something. They go and take it.

For a long time, I didn’t know where I stood. I told myself I was just walking, just observing, just reacting. But after years in the streets, after thousands of kilometers and millions of steps, I realized that this distinction was not theoretical at all.

It was a mirror.

And in that mirror, I finally saw who I really am.

Walking as a Ritual

When I walk with a camera, I am not going somewhere. I am entering a dimension.

The street is no longer a street. It becomes a living organism. A breathing entity. A field of forces. A stage where thousands of micro-dramas unfold every second, most of them unnoticed, unlived, unremembered.

I walk slowly. Sometimes fast. Very rarely I stop for long minutes in the same place. More often I change direction for no rational reason. I follow a shadow. A reflection. A gesture that hasn’t happened yet but is about to.

This is not technique. This is not strategy.

It is listening.

The city speaks constantly, but only to those who have learned its language. And that language is not made of words. It is made of light, movement, tension, coincidence. It is made of small alignments that last a fraction of a second and then disappear forever.

The hunter does not impose himself on the landscape. He dissolves into it.

The Instinct Before the Image

There is always a moment before the photograph.

A moment where nothing is visible yet. Nothing is framed. Nothing is composed. And yet something is already vibrating in the air. A subtle pressure. A silent promise. A tension.

I have learned to trust that sensation more than my eyes.

Sometimes I lift the camera before knowing why. Sometimes I turn around because something behind me is calling. Sometimes I wait because the space in front of me feels unfinished.

This is where photography becomes metaphysical.

Because what I am responding to is not what is. It is what is about to be.

The hunter lives in that threshold. Between presence and absence. Between chaos and form. Between randomness and meaning.

The image is only the trace. The real act happens before the shutter.

Time as Prey

With the years, I stopped thinking of street photography as collecting moments.

I started thinking of it as confronting time.

Every photograph is a small act of resistance. Against disappearance. Against forgetting. Against the brutal indifference of time that erases everything without mercy. Well, aganst the system.

The hunter does not chase animals. He chases seconds.

Seconds that will never return. Gestures that will never repeat. Faces that will never be in that light again. Streets that will never hold that exact configuration of bodies, shadows, and chance.

When I press the shutter, I am not freezing a moment. I am stealing it from oblivion.

And I know that time always wins. But for an instant, I win too.

The Solitude of the Hunter

Yes, I know someone tried to sell street photography as a collective game. And Street photography is often romanticized as freedom.

But the deeper you go, the lonelier it becomes.

Not because you are alone in the streets, but because you are alone in your perception. No one sees what you see. No one feels the tension you feel. No one understands really what you are doing with your camera.

The hunter carries his obsession silently.

Friends ask why you walk so much. Why you look so tired. Why you disappear for hours. They see the images but not the hunt. They see the result but not the trance.

Because that’s what it is. A trance.

A form of controlled madness that sharpens your senses and isolates you from the world even while you are standing in its middle.

After So Many Years

Well, 20 years. After so many years photographing in the street, I no longer believe I chose this path.

I think it chose me.

I recognize the hunter in old photographs, long before I had words for him. I see him in the way I frame. In the way I move through the city.

The camera is only the visible part of the ritual. The real work happens inside.

In the patience. In the hunger. In the attention.

In the refusal to accept reality as something finished.

A Way of Being

To be a hunter in the street is not a role. It is a condition.

It is a way of inhabiting the world. Of walking through it with open senses and a restless heart. Of knowing that meaning is fragile and fleeting, and that our only power is to recognize it when it passes in front of us.

I do not photograph because I want to show something.

I photograph because I want to understand something.

And what I am trying to understand, after all these years, is not the street.

It is myself.

I am writing these notes in the margin of a self-analysis of my approach and my wanderings with camera. I can see that I no longer care about how I look with a particular camera, but use the camera that really allows me to do the job in the simplest and most direct way possible. I don't even give much priority to a small, compact, discreet camera anymore. I don't care. I don't hide in what I do.

I am a street photographer and I do photos.

Mexico City, Jan. 2026