We are all doing the same things in our daily lives.
People are the same everywhere. Not similar, not comparable, the same. Someone in Tokyo checking a phone while waiting for a train is doing exactly what someone in Lisbon is doing at a tram stop. We all are doing the same things regardless of the place we live in.
We are more alike, my friend,
Maya Angelou – Human Family
than we are unalike.
In each city I go for a walk that tells a story, a story that becomes the common thread that binds all images together. The route shows the city’s everyday live. On the walk I usually take between 1000 and 1500 photos of objects that interest me, streets that look interesting or not, situations that look familiar and those that do not. Many pictures of people going on with their daily business. On average I take one photo every 5 seconds. The photos taken along that walk, then broken into fragments and rebuilt as pages, stripped of enough detail that they stop reading as documentation and start reading as feeling. I reduce the photographic quality to the level of a graphic novel removing the distractions of the photo realism.
It started in Tokyo in 1994, at Shibuya Station, watching three million people a day moving without it turning into chaos. Istanbul came next in 1996, where I walked from Topkapi Gate to Topkapi Palace. This walk got revisited in 2024 where I blended old photographs and new ones in the same frame. Lisbon followed in 2019 where I walked along tramline 28. Berlin in 2023, eleven kilometers along where the Wall used to stand. London the same year, ten kilometers around the City of London and its fourteen dragon guardians. Rome in 2024, circling all seven hills the city was originally built from. 2025 saw Athens added to the list.
Six cities and counting
Seven cities so far, seven walks, one observation repeating itself everywhere it’s tested: strip away the backdrop and the language and the reason, and what people are actually doing on any given day looks the same no matter where you stand. More places to follow.
