Max Sturgeon on street photography, flash, and the emotion that layering leaves out. In this Eyeshot 50mm conversation the American photographer explains why he lowers the camera and waits for people to look at him before he releases the shutter.

In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Max Sturgeon, American photographer and winner of the Eyeshot Open Call in the series category, describes a practice built entirely outside the conventional route. Photography reached him through two other passions, cinema and travel, and after twenty years working on film sets he moved what was left of that creative energy into the street. He does not shoot at home, because nothing there surprises him any more, and he defends the position of the outsider without dismissing the argument for the local photographer. He breaks one of the most repeated rules of the genre on purpose: he frames through the viewfinder, lowers the camera, and waits for eye contact before he takes the picture. He calls street photography soulless when it stacks people and layers with no emotion underneath. He talks about the flash he swore he would never use, and about the trap it sets for the photographers who do. He admits, without softening it, that he shoots pictures he knows will do well online. And he explains how Of a Different Stripe was already edited before he ever submitted it, how a workshop on sequencing changed the way he builds a body of work, and why anyone entering an open call should send a series. Follow Eyeshot for more street and documentary photography.

His book Of a Different Stripe was published by Eyeshot in 2021, hardcover, 160 pages, with a foreword by Vineet Vohra. The limited edition is sold out.

Watch the full video interview on YouTube. https://youtu.be/tz2epbYN7AY

Lorenzo Catena designed buildings before he photographed people. In this Eyeshot 50mm conversation the Roman street photographer, co-author with Valeria Tofanelli of the sold out Eyeshot book Mareterno, explains what happened the day he watched another photographer reinterpret his own architecture, and everything that followed. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Lorenzo Catena talks about reading the street in thresholds and layers, choosing between color and black and white at gut level, making flash pass for natural light, the year and a half spent photographing the sea of Rome for Mareterno, why the rules of street photography are not a checklist, what the reel culture is doing to photographers, and why the future of street photography is the authenticity of the moment.

Watch the full video interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8BasAeD5evc

Bill Shapiro spent years deciding which photographs a country would look at. In this second Eyeshot 50mm conversation he moves to the other side of the submission and says plainly what a juror sees, what an editor does, and what has kept photographers working for decades. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Bill Shapiro, former Editor-in-Chief of LIFE, founding editor of LIFE.com and co-founder of BluePhoto Collective, returns as a juror of the Eyeshot Open Call 2026. He dismantles the belief that jurors reward work resembling their own, describes the picture that made him choose against his own taste, and explains why a photograph that needs four paragraphs of explanation is not communicating well enough. He talks about the editor as a stand-in for the viewer, editing as a genuinely artistic act, and the danger of a style that hardens into a gimmick. He argues that gatekeeper is not a dirty word, describes the small daily act he uses to force his own algorithm open, and names what has mattered more than talent in every long career he has watched. He closes with the photographs of a village in northern New Mexico that sat in a basement for fifty years before anyone saw them. Follow Eyeshot for more street and documentary photography.

British Malaysian photographer Ian Teh has spent more than three decades photographing the relationship between economic development, environmental change and human life, and now returns to the China archive that began his career. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, British Malaysian documentary photographer Ian Teh talks with Lucrezia Bonarota about growing up between Malaysia, China and Britain, the 1995 journey that turned photography into a possible life, and the long, patient years spent documenting China during its most dramatic transformation. He speaks about photographing progress without celebrating or condemning it, the migrant workers behind projects of staggering scale, editing people into silhouettes to reveal the machine that moved them, and why a photograph is strongest when it leaves room for reflection. His new limited edition with Eyeshot, Undercurrents – Reframed: China 1999-2008, reopens that archive and reinterprets it from the present. Follow Eyeshot for more street and documentary photography.

American street photographer Richard Bram has spent more than forty years catching the small, telling gestures of public life, most recently from his base in London, and now shapes a vast black-and-white archive into a book of fleeting narratives. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Richard Bram talks with Lucrezia Bonarota about coming to photography late, self-taught, at thirty-two, armed with 'ignorance and courage'. He learned in the darkroom and the public library, trained his eye editing under pressure ('a good edit fills the wastebasket'), and became a founding member of in-public, the collective that insisted street photography was not dead. He speaks about wanting uncertainty over explanation, why the click turns reality into fiction, the ethics of candid work today, and the street as a theatre set waiting for its actors. His new limited edition with Eyeshot, Restless Eye, gathers decades of that restless, curious looking into one book. Follow Eyeshot for more street and documentary photography.

British photographer Paul Trevor has spent more than fifty years photographing public life, most of it in East London, and now reopens his black-and-white archive as a book that plays. In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, British street and documentary photographer Paul Trevor talks with Lucrezia Bonarota about a life spent photographing public life. Largely self-taught, he came to photography through cinema and co-founded the Exit Photography Group in 1973, learning alongside other photographers who had no school but each other. He speaks about street photography as learning about loss, the shots that haunt you because you missed them, the generosity of the street, and the discipline of the analogue years: the darkroom, the contact sheets, the slow burn. His new limited-edition book with Eyeshot, Riffs, returns to his archive from the 1970s and 1980s and pairs images from different times and places until new meaning appears through rhythm and surprise.

Documentary photographer Alex Kornhuber has spent more than twenty years photographing Peru, its people, land, labour and migration, and the question of who we really are. In this interview, Peruvian-German documentary photographer Alex Kornhuber talks about a life spent photographing Peru. Born to a German father and a Peruvian mother, Alex has always felt he belongs everywhere and nowhere, a feeling that lets him enter realities different from his own. Over two decades he moved past the tourist mask of Peru toward its hidden, more difficult places: mining towns like La Rinconada at 5,400 meters, the extraction economy that shapes entire families, and the land that makes its people resilient and creative. He speaks candidly about the ethics of consent, stealing a shot and negotiating with the people in it, the emotions that get in the way of editing, and what he keeps from masters like Koudelka, Robert Frank and Cartier-Bresson.

In this episode of Eyeshot 50mm, Australian street photographer Mark Davidson talks about street photography beyond Instagram, visual performance, clichés, and the pressure to make images that simply “work” online. Together, we discuss his late start in photography, his relationship with Melbourne, the use of flash as a way to capture tension and unease, the ethics of photographing strangers, and why failure, patience, and long-term projects are essential to building meaningful work.

Eyeshot 50mm is our interview series dedicated to street and documentary photography: raw, direct conversations with photographers who turn the streets into visual stories. Subscribe to Eyeshot, explore our books and discover more interviews with contemporary street and documentary photographers.

Five Eyeshot photographers on what photography is for now: gear and humility, fame and the unique eye, ethics, survival, and why they keep looking.

"How to See: Best of Eyeshot Q2" brings together the five photographers of this season's Eyeshot release, Margarita Mavromichalis (Street Weather), Markus Andersen (The Grey Hours), Paul Russell (The Secret Lives of Humans), Federico Rios (White Line), and Adriana Zehbrauskas (Alma), in a single thematic conversation about contemporary photography. From street photography and documentary photography to ethics, authorship, visual storytelling, gear obsession, personal work, dignity, survival, memory, and the act of looking, this episode is a slow and human conversation about what still gives a photograph meaning in a world saturated with images.

Not five interviews, but one story told through five different eyes. Discover the Q2 Eyeshot Collection and pre-order the books before June 30.

Richard Sandler joins Eyeshot 50mm for a raw conversation on New York street photography, film, flash, eye contact, documentary filmmaking, and what it means to photograph the unrehearsed human face. One of the defining street photographers of late 20th-century New York, Sandler reflects on photographing the city in the 1980s, working with Leica cameras and flash, learning from Gary Winogrand, dealing with risk, rejection, the technique of two pictures in one frame, the same technique he once taught a young Bruce Gilden, and the presence of the photographer in the frame. He speaks about why he never wanted to be invisible, why eye contact can reveal something deeply human, and why the best photographs often ask more questions than they answer. Direct, funny and uncompromising, a portrait of a photographer who never stopped questioning what he was looking at.