Prague, against the light
Prague Castle, September 2026
My last Schengen visa ran out just before covid. We had a trip planned with friends, across the whole of Spain and up to the Basque Country. It didn't happen. After 2022 it got harder still, and living in Istanbul doesn't make the paperwork any shorter.
This year I tried my luck again, and it worked. Seven years after the last time, I landed in Bratislava with a camera.
It didn't happen in Bratislava. I ran along the Danube, walked the old town after dark, and came back with a few frames that are fine and nothing more. The eye wasn't there. It had been a long time since I'd photographed like this.
Then Prague, for two days, with friends. I've been there many times, though never in weather like this, and never much further than Prague 1. This time there was Prague 7, which turned out to be lovely and easy to be in, and one morning a seven-kilometre run along the river and through the parks.
We did nothing in particular. Walked, stopped for a coffee, walked on, stopped to eat. At some point I noticed that I wanted to take pictures. Not that I ought to, being in Prague with a camera, but that I wanted to.
The Vltava, from the morning run.
I have notes from Gueorgui Pinkhassov's workshops, in Russian and in my own shorthand. Roughly:
You don't need a story, you need a picture. The eye should be shooting, not the idea. Shoot what you see without understanding what it is. Otherwise you will photograph stories, and there will be characters in them. What you want is colour, patches, lines.
Prague is a hard city for that. Everything in it already means something: the bridge, the castle, the clock. You know what you are supposed to photograph, and so does everyone standing next to you.
For a few hours I stopped photographing Prague. What came back first was the simplest thing: light and shadow, silhouettes. I suspect it's the easy way into that lesson. When the sun is this hard it removes the story for you; a person on a staircase is a shape before you've had time to decide who they are.
Then it went, as it does.
The band at the Castle was the exception. St. Wenceslas Day, red uniforms, the flag, the presidential standard: everything a picture of Prague is supposed to contain. I took that one too.
