I don’t know how most people operate when they do street photo | Kyoto Insights ⎈

I don’t know how most people operate when they do street photography, but I need to immerse myself in a weird state of observing the city as a flow of aesthetically meaningful symbols, disregarding particular details or physical properties of the landscape. Contrary to what you might expect from a person processing data from the outside world, my favorite pictures are taken in a complete dispersal of attention and lack of acute visual focus due to an ongoing introverted search for references and meanings. Does that gas station remind me of some movie set in Detroit that I watched back in 2015?.. Wait, that street’s width and buildings’ heights proportion is so typical for small towns in southern Russia. But this courtyard looks a bit like Italy. Aren’t these rusty window shutters colored exactly like the front gate at my grandparents’ house? To me Hakodate became the most photogenic city in Japan because of the amount of references at every corner that I could decipher and appreciate with my past experiences of living in Russia and Europe. No wonder I completely zoned out and slipped on an icy slope with my camera at some point. "I was looking for the great beauty" and I guess I found it.