Let me start with a confession: I have never once asked permission to take a photograph. Not out of malice, nor rebellion but because the second someone agrees to be photographed, they’re no longer the thing I want to see. Consent, in street photography, is an afterthought. The image comes first, moral digestion later.
I go by P. Not because I’m mysterious (though I don’t mind the reputation), but because I once had a name too long to fit on a gallery wall label. Now I just sign with a single initial, which seems to please curators, tax accountants, and the occasional collector who enjoys the idea of buying from someone slightly unknowable.
My latest series, “Oblique Morning / Direct Light”, was shot over two damp weeks in Marseille, where the air smells of broken stone and faint, eternal bread. I walked with a battered Leica M6 and three rolls of Kodak Tri-X. Only three. Scarcity makes you honest. You cannot afford to chase ghosts when you have 108 frames and your back hurts from standing still too long outside an unattended laundrette.
I don’t compose—I hover. I wait. I arrange myself in the periphery of other people’s intentions. The man looking down at his shoe? He thinks he’s checking a lace. In my frame, he’s reconsidering his entire life. That’s the power of a shutter click: it invents gravity where only dust existed.
Someone once called my work “decisively melancholic.” I liked that. Cartier-Bresson had his decisive moment, I have mine—though mine usually occur just after someone’s missed the bus or dropped a sandwich. There’s a quiet epic in every tiny defeat, and I chase them like a priest of futility.
Back in London, I sometimes develop the film myself. There’s a method to it: long evenings with music I don’t like, gloves that never quite fit, and the same cracked Paterson tank I’ve had since art school. The first images surface in the tray like memory fragments. I dry them on a clothesline in the kitchen, next to some rosemary. The smell is confusing.
A few years ago, a collector bought one of my prints—Man With Newspaper, Not Reading It—for what I then considered an indecent amount of money. I spent it all on film, black coffee and an apartment overlooking the Thames. Now, as a represented artist with Pimlico Wilde, I’m told my prices have “stabilised upwards.” Which is to say, they’ve become largely unaffordable. I often meet people who own my work but have never taken a bus. It’s humbling.
Still, my audience has been good to me. They know better than to ask for colour. And they never push me to make work “about joy.” I don’t photograph joy. I photograph the moment just before or just after, when the subject isn’t aware it was joy at all.
I suppose that’s what I’m always looking for: the unseen punctuation in the sentence of a day. A glance that was never meant to be read. A truth not performed but leaked.
And if someone asks what I do, I usually say: I take pictures of people who haven’t decided.
It keeps the conversation short.
— P.
Limited edition prints from “Oblique Morning / Direct Light” available by arrangement.