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Photographing passersby from behind is the easiest move in street photography: I’ve done it myself. But I quickly realized that it’s the first habit to break if you want to go beyond casual snapshots, no matter how uncomfortable that might feel.

Now I choose the uncomfortable honesty of facing a “composition” head-on, but always with respect for privacy, through an abstract approach. That’s my experiment and my ethics.

This experiment later led to my Fstoppers article, Is It the End of Street Photography as a Genre?, which sparked a wider debate about the changing ethics of street photography. The questions it raised have since entered the practice of other photographers.

Three works made in the moment when the low December sun sets Dipoli, the main building of Aalto University, ablaze.

Its sharp, fractured geometry makes the play of light inevitable: edges are exposed, surfaces break apart, and warm and cold tones separate naturally. The camera movement stays in dialogue with the architecture.

This is not about the building as an object, but about what happens when light becomes an action and architecture becomes the field where it unfolds.

I took these photographs at a classic car parade in Senate Square, approaching the same scene in two different ways.

In the first group, I worked with framing, color, reflections, and the shapes of the cars themselves. I also wanted to experiment with something of Saul Leiter’s use of color and compositional mood. 

The cars remain recognizable, but their surfaces, reflections, and overlapping forms begin to create compositions of their own.

Looking back, I find a certain quietness and softness in these images, with a hint of the 1960s atmosphere I was looking for.

The second group was made in the same place, but through camera movement. Here, the cars become material for the gesture: their colors, contours, and reflections stretch and merge, while in some images traces of their original forms remain visible.

The subject is the same, but the way of seeing changes. In one, abstraction begins with framing; in the other, with gesture.

The source is an urban fragment altered by overexposure in direct sunlight. The camera gesture and intense light divide the frame: one area collapses into a blank field, while another develops ribbed patterns and sharper detail. A single element of the scene, the red bench, remains visible, anchoring the abstraction to the scene in front of the camera.

Part of Vertical Diffusion.

Pines, rhododendrons, and blooming azaleas create a nearly dreamlike palette of colors. A single brushstroke of the camera transforms the park into an abstraction of color and movement.

Colors of Summer was selected as both Editor’s Choice and Photo of the Day by Fstoppers, an international photography platform, in June 2025.

The source is wind-driven water, where surface movement breaks into shifting patterns of reflected light.

In each image, the camera gesture follows the direction and speed of the wave, aligning with its motion rather than defining it.

The resulting works contain both the trace of the gesture and the trace of the wind written into the water.