When Photography Becomes a Trial of Intentions

I am no longer a staff writer for a major photography publication.

Following a series of increasingly hostile, vulgar, and deeply personal attacks under one of my opinion articles, the collaboration came to an end.

When I first learned of the decision, I genuinely hoped it could be reconsidered. After reflecting on everything that happened, however, I realized that I no longer have any interest in being part of an environment where toxicity, personal attacks, and ignorance are allowed to overshadow photography itself.

One of the reasons I enjoyed writing there was the opportunity to bring more opinion pieces and cultural discussions to a platform largely centered on gear and product reviews. I believed there was room for conversations about photography as a language, not just as equipment.

What happened only reinforced something I had already sensed for years.

Documentary street photography is still one of the most misunderstood genres in photography. It is judged, attacked, and often condemned by people who know very little about its history, its ethics, or its cultural significance.

I would rather keep my work and my ideas in places where photography can still be discussed with curiosity, knowledge, and mutual respect, rather than through insults, vulgarity, and moral grandstanding.

PLEASE NOTE: This text is an English adaptation of the article I published on my blog in Italian fotoreportando

For some time now I have had the feeling that something much deeper than a simple change in photographic taste has been taking place around photography itself. It has very little to do with aesthetics and much more to do with the increasingly polarized dynamics that social media have normalized, where every discussion seems to require heroes and villains, people to celebrate and people to destroy. Once everything is reduced to that logic, photographs stop being photographs and become little more than excuses to judge the people who made them.

I find myself seeing this happen over and over again, particularly whenever documentary street photography enters the conversation. Instead of looking at the image, people immediately begin looking for hidden intentions. They decide what the photographer must have been thinking, why a certain person was photographed, what psychological motivation lies behind a body of work, and eventually what kind of individual the photographer must be. The image itself slowly disappears from the discussion because it is no longer considered interesting; what matters is constructing a narrative around its author, often with a certainty that would be impossible to support with facts.

Criticism has always been part of photography and nobody who takes photography seriously should expect to be protected from it. Criticism, however, requires a willingness to understand what is being looked at, to know something about the history of the medium and to engage honestly with the photograph before drawing conclusions. Increasingly, I see the opposite happening. A single image is isolated from its context and becomes enough to justify an entire theory about the person behind the camera, as though one frame could reveal the moral character of someone whose life the viewer knows absolutely nothing about.

Take a very ordinary example. A photographer publishes a selection of street photographs in which, by coincidence, the people photographed happen to be women. There is nothing sexual about the photographs, nothing humiliating, nothing that questions the dignity of those subjects, and yet it only takes a few minutes before someone concludes that the photographer must have an unhealthy fixation with women. The accusation is presented with complete confidence despite being based on nothing more than a projection, and it is difficult not to think of Garry Winogrand, who received remarkably similar accusations after publishing Women Are Beautiful decades ago. History changes far less than we like to believe.

The irony is that anyone who has spent time with serious street photographers knows perfectly well that this is not how they work. They do not leave home deciding to photograph women, or men, or children. They photograph life as it unfolds in front of them. One moment it is a person crossing the street, the next it is a reflection, a dog, a taxi, a broken window, a discarded newspaper, an empty chair, a traffic light or a billboard. Their attention moves constantly because the street itself never stops changing, and reducing that process to a simplistic accusation says far more about the person making the accusation than it does about the photographer.