How time is reverted in Street Photography

Past, present and future.
That’s the right order of time. We’re used to perceiving time as a linear, one-directional dimension. You might have heard this before: entropy always grows. You’ve seen a glass breaking and becoming fragments of what it was, but you’ve never seen the opposite. The cause comes before the consequence; it has always been like this.

Acts have consequences.

Let me rephrase it: the past affects the present, and the present affects the future. This is our intuitive understanding of time and actions as a chain of consequences. But if we think a bit deeper, we can see how this is not always the case. Time is relative, yes, we’ve heard this from Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but I’m not referring to that specific description of time. When I say time is relative, I mean that this logical chronological sequence of concepts – past, present and future – is not always like this.

The future can affect the past, the future can affect the present, the present can affect the past.

Imagine yourself living an experience, a neutral, unmoving experience. I’m sure we’ve all lived many of these. Think how you felt in that moment. And now think how you feel about it now. It has changed.

How you felt during an experience is not the same as how you feel about it now, because everything that happened after that experience – all that you’ve lived from that specific moment until now – has changed you as a person. It has changed your perception, your feelings, your thoughts about the different nuances of life. You have changed, therefore how you feel about that experience has changed too. The future after that experience has shaped that past experience. The order of time is not the intuitive past, present, future that we stated in the beginning.

And this happens in street photography too.

Some time ago you started taking photos. You were just a novice in this subtle art of capturing time in a physical, tangible way. If you think about your first photo walk, I’m sure you felt pretty happy with your first photos taken with an actual camera and not your phone. And probably, if you take a look at them right now, you won’t feel the same way, because you have changed, you have evolved as a photographer.

Our experiences, learning and practice have shaped our taste in photography. So, what we like right now, the style of photography that we enjoy and want to do right now… is it because we really connect with that way of doing photography, or is it just a consequence of what we have consumed, what we have practiced, what we have learned?

The photobooks we bought, the movies we saw, the videos or documentaries we watched, the photowalks we took, the courses or workshops we attended. Are they determining what we like?

Well, yes and no. We, as humans, are partly genetics and partly experience. We have a certain predisposition for certain things, and experience will modulate and shape how that predisposition evolves.

So we are a consequence of both: genetics and our experiences. Yes, all those things have shaped our taste for photography, and they have changed – and will keep changing – what we think and how we feel about our past photographs. What we like now, we might hate in the future. What doesn’t move us now, what we don’t enjoy or appreciate today, we might love in a couple of years.

So what? How should this affect us?

Well, it shouldn’t change our way of doing this art. The only takeaway I keep is that we shouldn’t delete what we don’t like right now. Of course, we have to edit our photos, select what we like, what works, and discard what doesn’t. But if you doubt, if something inside you tells you not to delete a photo, if you hesitate for a second while editing, don’t delete it. Let it breathe. Let that photo remain in your archive.

Someday you might come back and thank your past you.
Your future you will thank your past you.

Street Photography Hacks Your Natural Brain Behaviour

How Street Photography can change your nervous system for better

We acquire experience through repetition. A single, isolated experience has almost no biological value. The value lies in learning how to respond to a stimulus that appears again and again in our environment, in a way that helps us stay alive.

The more often something happens, the more automatic our response becomes. It turns dull. Our brain learns to handle it without needing our full attention. We can perform the action while thinking about something else, mentally being somewhere else.

This process has a name: habituation. Habituation is a mechanism the brain uses to stop wasting energy on repetitive, predictable stimuli. It’s an efficient evolutionary strategy. Daily situations become automated procedures. The brain optimizes for efficiency, not for beauty. A camera can interrupt that.

Repetition becomes boring. We learn how to do things without thinking. We detach. We drift away from the present moment and go mentally elsewhere. But that only happens once we’ve gone through the same experience many times and the brain has learned to run it automatically. So when we walk the same streets, in the same city, following the same routes, we’re often not actually there. The body moves through space, but the mind is absent.

Seeing consciously is unnatural to us. It resists our biology. It works against efficiency, and in favor of beauty. That is exactly what we’re doing when we’re shooting street photography.

Street photography can break this automatic response. Even if we’re walking the same paths we’ve walked a hundred times, and repeating actions our body can now perform unconsciously, the simple act of carrying a camera — and having the intention to make photographs — forces us to become present. Physically present, but also mentally present.

When the mind is focused on making images, we begin to actively and deliberately observe. We are not just moving through the streets anymore. We are noticing them. We start paying attention to details that live inside the familiar, repetitive patterns our brain normally filters out as “not important for survival.”

With a camera, we turn off the brain’s autopilot.

We hack our own experience. We interfere with the default behavior of our nervous system. We step in and take control of how we perceive reality.

While the brain is constantly trying to save energy, reduce thinking time, and minimize effort, we reverse that simply by deciding to carry a camera. In doing so, we wake our attention up during the walk.

Those repetitive stimuli — the ones we’ve learned to react to automatically for the sake of survival — become compositional elements we can use for our own enjoyment, curiosity, and creation. Traffic signs that guide us through the streets. Light and shadow that outline our path. Strangers we subconscio

usly avoid or who avoid us. Cars weaving through the city like blood through veins. Pigeons that seem to exist in a separate layer of reality, indifferent to us, yet sharing our space. The hidden shadows carved out by beams of light on building facades.

Every element that makes up the city — the things we see every day, the things we’ve learned to decode in order to navigate the urban chaos without thinking — is reborn. They appear again. We wake up from the unconscious transit and start assigning value, giving beauty, to objects, gestures, and scenes that we would normally ignore completely.

All of this comes from a biological system that once helped us survive. A mechanism that puts us into a kind of mental sleep during repetitive, routine, automatable actions.

Our attention is anesthetized to conserve energy. That’s why reactivating it feels difficult. Looking is an active process. It demands mental work. It tires us out. Not just the walking — the seeing. Truly seeing is mentally exhausting. But it also rewards us. It keeps us in the present. It makes us enjoy the moment. It teaches us to appreciate the beauty of the repetitive, the ordinary, the daily processes that surround us.

Our photos are not just images. They are records of moments of awareness. They are evidence that, for an instant, we were fully there.

So when we think our photography is useless, that we didn’t “get anything,” that we’re not making the art we intended to make, we should remember what actually happened: we saw what most people walk past. Street photography helped us wake up. It helped us enjoy the present. It taught us to appreciate the beauty of the mundane — the quiet subtleties and hidden details inside what looks boring or worthless, inside what our brain usually discards because it has no survival value.

We turned nature upside down for a moment. We looked it in the eye, and we appreciated it, even when it wanted to disappear into the background.

Why Layering in Street Photography?

Layering is one of the most interesting, eye-catching and difficult to master concepts in street photography. Why? Physics and Neuroscience might have an answer.

Once you’re past the first steps of street photography, you’re no longer satisfied with capturing a single scene or person. Or maybe you just want to level up and add richer, more complex techniques. It’s very common to gravitate toward layering. But why? Why are we pulled toward this specific way of capturing the street? It feels like a puzzle: you’re handed multiple pieces and have to arrange them, make sense of them, and bring order to the chaos the street gives you.

“ Having multiple subjects, doing different things, placed at different distances, each in its own space satisfies our eye, but why?”

It won’t be true for everyone, but many of us—street photographers—are drawn to images where different people sit at different depths inside an ordered frame. Chaotic streets, rendered as a surprisingly harmonic picture. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s thought about how our brain works, and how physical systems work in general.

Physics tells us that any system can be in an ordered or a disordered state. A flock of sheep on a hillside, a colony of viruses, or water itself. Wildly different systems, but all describable by how ordered they are. They can be highly chaotic or highly ordered.

Here’s the twist: the most interesting things usually happen during the transition between order and disorder. In physics we call this the critical point—that sweet spot between chaos and absolute order. You’ve probably met it indirectly in phenomena like fractals and phase transitions.

So it’s not shocking that our brain—also a physical system—performs best when it’s operating near that edge. What does that mean in practice? How can a brain be “at the critical point”?

Measuring “how ordered” the brain is isn’t straightforward. Scientists have spent a long time on this. By mapping brain activity to well-known physical models, they can estimate how ordered the brain is at a given moment. The takeaway is simple: performance peaks when the brain sits closest to the critical point, right on the border between order and chaos.

Back to photography. It makes total sense that we’re visually attracted to systems close to that edge, because our brain itself performs best there. Our brain is drawn to systems that feel like us. It is empathic in some way, we aim for familiar systems, we look for what we intrinsically are.

We also seek information. That’s evolutionary. As a species we needed as much actionable information as possible to survive and make decisions in the wild. We still carry that bias. Given any situation, we’re most engaged when the information available is maximized.

And guess what? The critical point is precisely where information flow is highest. That’s why the brain hums there; it can process more than in any other state. That’s why a layered photo hits hard when it sits between order and chaos: the available information is peaking. Information is the hook. It’s what pulls us into complex, layered street photographs.

Layering isn’t about stacking bodies just to look clever. It’s about tuning a scene to that edge—enough order to read it, enough chaos to feel it. Foreground, mid-ground, background; light and shadow; rhythm and interruption. So when we are layering we are not just composing, we are trying to find the critical point, we are trying to explain the story with the most information possible.

5 Days of Street Photography in New York.

5 mins read.

Recommendations

New York Street Photography. Where to go, what equipment to use? My experience

New York City is a whirlwind of energy—chaotic yet beautifully ordered. Over five days of street photography, I discovered how the city’s frenetic pace unveils a subtle rhythm, a dance between people and their environment that transforms chaos into moments of clarity.

Experiment with under exposing to avoid chaotic scenes and find order in them.

Tips for Capturing the NYC Experience

Equipment Matters

I shot with a Fuji X-E4 and two prime lenses—an 18mm f/2 and a 27mm f/2. This setup is small, versatile, and quick to maneuver, making it perfect for the bustling streets. Wide-angle lenses are ideal for capturing the energy of crowded scenes; I found the 18mm (28mm equivalent) great for busy areas. In contrast, the 27mm (40mm equivalent) was perfect for quieter, more intimate moments, even though sometimes it was useful to isolate a smaller group of people inside the big chaotic crowd.

Not so crowded environments can be tackled with 35 or 40mm lens. See how you can arrange different subjects along the frame.

Try to find quiet moments. Seek for beautiful light, New York is not only chaos.

Best Locations:

• Manhattan: Start here to soak in the iconic skyline. The reflections off glass buildings, the steam rising from street vents, the different element streets and the constant flow of people create endless opportunities for dynamic shots.

Use different elements from the streets to order your frame and isolate subjects.

Don't get lost by the chaos in Manhattan, there is also quite colorful interesting moments if you look for them.

Soho and Chinatown: For a completely different vibe, you have Soho for a modern, fashion-forward crowd, and Chinatown for a vibrant cultural experience. Here, you’ll capture a diverse array of expressions and styles that contrast sharply with the corporate atmosphere of Manhattan.

Take advantage of the diversity and the beauty of Chinatown's scenary

In the midst of all this activity, look for those critical points—moments when chaos gives way to harmony. Look for interesting light, try to order your subjects and arrange them inside the chaos and disorder, be present, and interesting images will arise naturally.

As you explore, remember that New York thrives on contrast: the hurried workers and joyful tourists, the quiet corners and bustling squares.

Look for interesting characters and situations. There is plenty of them in Chinatown

In the end, street photography in New York is about more than just capturing images; it's about witnessing the beautiful complexity of life unfolding before you. Embrace the chaos and seek out the order.