Brussels - Urban Fragments and Suspended Gazes

Brussels is too familiar for me to observe it without projecting my own daily life onto it. This street photography series was born without a plan, following the streets I take out of habit. Gray days, low light and, sometimes, an unexpected breakthrough. It’s a city of readily available solitude, where the eye settles on what we no longer try to see.

Photographing the familiar.

I didn’t try to “show” the city, but to let the images come to me. In the back courtyards, the empty shop windows and the lowered shutters, I found a humanity that isn’t trying to look beautiful. Brussels is full of contradictions: alive and weary, tender and rough. I see in it a kind of necessary disorder, an unadorned beauty.

A city in layers.

Like many European cities, Brussels carries its own layers. But here, they are the result of a bittersweet accumulation, of a hesitant and sincere urbanism. I photograph its blind spots, its nearly empty cafés and its hurried pedestrians. I’m interested in what doesn’t shout, in what doesn’t impose itself at first glance. A terrace emptied by the rain, orange and blue chairs lined up like an abandoned game, sometimes says more than a crowded street. On the metro platform, a lone figure against the beige wall carries the same wait, sheltered from the city’s noise.

A reflection of myself.

Photographing Brussels means photographing a reflection of myself. It’s a study of the persistence of looking, in an environment where habit ends up masking the essential.