Times have changed. In the last couple of years, everything is different than before. Photography has also changed.

The street photography I do merges with my journalistic activity. There is no real separation now.

Street photography, my street photography benefits from greater awareness. Call it experience or years that run. Or maybe it is that the conviction that the photograph I take should respond only to me and to what I want and what interests me comes out even more strengthened in me. No winks at trends, no imposition that I feel. And in fact in this last year I have quite abandoned the design approach. Rather, I enjoy the individual photographic moments I encounter. Ontologically, I still ask myself many questions about my doing that I then happen to pour in ink on the pages of my notebooks. But this has always been part of me.

At the beginning of the pandemic I was able to observe how many street photographers have blamed the blow of such an imponderable event. Some continued to photograph but as the streets in Europe were empty due to the lockdown they showed fatigue and an evident crisis. Both ideas and the ability to work in such conditions.

Personally, when everything was starting here too, I was busy with the last days of my first solo show in Mexico City downtown. AMERICANA exhibition largely featured urban landscapes that were often devoid of people, so seeing street photographers improvising on something that had been mine in the last three years made me smile because I saw how many just couldn't make compositions worthy of the name and everything seemed absolutely forced.

Furthermore, my attention as an observer and photo editor was also directed to photojournalism, where I saw a lot of rhetoric, with very uninteresting works that exploited the theater of the tragedy in progress, in a general flattening towards dramatization, perhaps through a black and white with deep pours of pitch. Between masks photographed on the asphalt and empty streets what emerged was above all a boredom and little to tell. Someone even proposed photographs of videoconferences and media responding to the same narrative rewarded such banalities with publication.

My reflection as a street photographer related to documenting showed this dichotomy through the PANDEMIC LIFE project. A work that, escaping from easy rhetoric, feeds on the essence of reality, without reticence or codes that have been commonly accepted over these two years.

As a photojournalist I threw myself out on the streets every single day, frequenting crowded places like markets 5 times a week and going to the historic center 3 times a week on average, even when many people advised against it.

Anyone who is an assiduous reader of this blog should already know my thoughts: currently i consider Street Photography to be the real photojournalism and through this post I want to clarify once and for all this idea.

Current Photojournalism has definitively married the globalist narrative and, with rare exceptions, it does not budge.

If journalism is good it is inherently controversial - Julian Assange

There has been an underlying problem with photojournalism for several years. Most of the time it has become synonymous with staged coverage. If I see how I move compared to many fellow photojournalists I see that I am going to look for the story where they do not go or simply ignore. While they are all there to photograph the king's coronation.

And asking for permission.

It is not what I am interested. In the search for the authentic lies the truth. And the truth isn't exactly what mainstream media wants. Journalism and photojournalism must be uncomfortable. And not what is good for governments.

My reflection concerns street photography because not having to respond to any media, such as newspapers and agencies, it has a truly independent nature. I pursue the truth. As a photographer and as a journalist. As an observer and writer of facts and perceptions. I deliver photos to agencies with cold captions that respect journalistic language, but the images speak for themselves. There would be no need to add anything. The reality of the world I live in is not what the mainstream media likes to be told. The truth remains in the memory of time.

I am happy that the agencies I work with accept my documentary work. Comforting in a very dark period where different ideas are censored and discriminated against. Where givers of truth are in fact people commissioned by large groups and financial interests.

Street Photography represents an opportunity to present the truth. First of all, stop thinking that street photography is that of the pig's head superimposed on the subject's head. That is just a visual joke, a trend consummated in recent years that says little about humanity.

I am referring to real street photography, the old school street photography. Giovanni Umicini and Joel Meyerowitz, Garry Winogrand and Vivian Maier… all photographers who have dedicated themselves to probing the human soul in the largest public stage in the world: the street and its daily life.

And in reflecting how certain social changes have taken place in the space of two years is a tremendous opportunity to document the human condition.

I can photograph the positioning of the subjects on the street, their virtues and tragedies. In fact, the pandemic has turned us ordinary people into protagonists. The street photographer in his predilection for the everyday allows us to understand a lot of society and its evolution (and involution) and offer a critical reading, if we want at times even ironic, absurd, even grotesque, of how our life has become.

In the interest and approach of a street photographer, a crucial moment of storytelling through images unfolds. The important thing is to understand it as witnesses of our time.

This is why I consider nowadays Street Photography to be the true and credible photojournalism.

The reason why Street Photography today is true and credible photojournalism

Street shots, Oaxaca and the next workshop

Street Photography vs Landscape Photography