Contemporary photography: what remains when everyone shoots

There is a number that keeps me awake. Every day, around the world, more than five billion photographs are taken. In a single week we produce more images than the entire twentieth century. And yet, if I asked you to recall one you saw on a screen yesterday, you probably could not. We have seen them all. We have looked at none.

This is where every reflection of mine on contemporary photography begins. Not with technique, not with cameras. With this strangeness: never so many images, never so little seeing.

The problem is not shooting, it is seeing

For a century photography had a clear task: to stop the real. It was proof, a document, a window. You only had to be there and press. The difficulty lay in the medium, in the film, the darkroom, the technical knowledge that excluded most people.

Today that task is over. The phone in your pocket exposes better than I do in difficult light. The camera sees on its own, focuses on its own, sometimes chooses the moment on its own. The technical barrier has fallen, and rightly so.

But when everyone can make a beautiful photograph, the beautiful photograph stops having value. One question remains that the machine cannot answer for you: why this, why now, why like this. Contemporary photography no longer lives in how you shoot. It lives in why you look.

Slowness has become a luxury

I confess something unfashionable. I work slowly. Some images rest for months before I understand what they were really looking for. I leave them in a drawer, I take them up again, sometimes I abandon them.

In an age that rewards quantity and speed, choosing slowness is almost an act of disobedience. I do not produce content, I build a few images that I hope can carry the weight of a wall and of the years. The difference between content and a work is all here: content is consumed, a work is inhabited.

This is what I mean by fine art photography today. Not a genre, not a style. A decision: to slow down when everything accelerates, to remove when everyone adds, to stay with a single image while the world scrolls a thousand a minute.

What I look for when I photograph

I do not look for reality. We already have reality, in abundance, in high definition. I look for a threshold. The point where a face stops being a face and becomes a question, where light does not illuminate but reveals, where the viewer does not recognise but feels something move.

I often start from a precise idea and arrive elsewhere. The photograph I imagined is almost never the one that remains. I am learning to trust this gap, the space between intention and result. Inside it, usually, is the true thing.

Why the print still matters

An image on a screen is infinite and therefore weightless. You can have it, copy it, forget it in the same second. A print is the opposite: it is one, it has a body, it occupies a space, it ages with you.

This is why I still believe in the limited edition fine art print. Not out of nostalgia, but because it gives photography back what quantity took from it: scarcity, and therefore attention. When a work exists in thirty numbered prints and not in infinite copies, you return to truly look at it.

Perhaps this, in the end, is the task of contemporary photography. Not to add images to a world that is drowning in them. But to choose the very few that deserve to be looked at twice, and to keep them.