The Hand on the Neck
This article was originally published on my substack. I decided to repost it because this photograph is now present on the homepage of this site.
The bus is moving. The city outside is noise, color, chaos. Inside, something else happens. A hand of a woman sitting in the place in fron of me, resting on the back of a neck. Fingers pressed into skin. A gold chain catching the sun.
It’s nothing. But it’s everything.
I lift the camera. I’m close, too close. Twenty-four millimeters of my lens and a gesture that feels private, almost untouchable. The act of raising the lens is bold, maybe reckless. But the image demands it. I demand it.
Intimacy isn’t always about words, or love, or confession. Sometimes it’s the way skin meets light. The way a hand finds its place without thinking. The ordinary gesture that holds a quiet sensuality, unplanned, honest. And that is poetry to my eyes.
William Eggleston showed me this: the world is full of electricity, and it lives in the banal. The small details charge the frame with more tension than the big ones. A chain, a shoulder, a curve of skin. There is a pulse in them, if you get close enough. That shadow. And the light making a triangle, just in her skin. Beautiful.
The closeness matters. From far away, it’s just another person on a bus. Up close, it’s a universe. The intimacy of proximity is dangerous, but it’s also where truth hides. And truth, real truth, is always delicate, always a little fragile.
This photograph is not about the bus, or the street outside. It’s about presence. About how a hand on the back of a neck can stop time, can hold the world, can become an entire story.
And that’s the point: street photography is not only about drama, or noise, or decisive moments. Or putting a lot of information inside the frame. Sometimes it’s about stillness. About the beauty of a gesture too fleeting to last, but strong enough to stay.
A hand. A neck. A chain. Intimacy, revealed. A document also, of a fascinated photographer.
Why This Image Opens My Website
This photograph represents everything I believe photography should be: intimate, human, and real. It was taken in Mexico City, inside an ordinary bus, during an unremarkable moment. Yet in that apparent simplicity, something powerful happens: a gesture, a small act of self-awareness, a fragment of everyday life that contains universes of meaning.
I chose this image to open my website because it embodies my way of seeing: the connection between people and their environment, the poetry hidden in the mundane, the quiet tension of observation. It’s not about spectacle or perfection: it’s about truth. It is pretty far to be perfect and that is also the reason I selected this photo to open my official website: there is a negative part on the right side of the frame, the subject is photographed by the shoulder. You are entering in my world and my idea of photography that goes against a lot of myths.
The hand on the neck, the chain catching the light, the reflection of the street outside: all these details speak of presence, of being there. This is how I approach street photography: not as a hunt for the exotic, but as a way of understanding life, one fleeting instant at a time.
