In the spring of 2024 I walked out early one morning onto a square in Rome. Almost no one around. A woman with a small dog. A few people passing. Empty café tables. The light was only just reaching the buildings.
I was looking for light and shadow — or at least that’s what I called it at the time. I went around the square a few times. I walked past the same shop window three times. There was a mannequin in it. At first I only saw the mannequin. Then the square, reflected in the glass. And then the mannequin saw the square. And I saw the mannequin seeing it.
Only then was there a photograph. It had been there the whole time. It took me three laps.
Photography is a strange business.
At first you press the shutter because something looks cool. Then you can’t stop. Then the questions arrive.
Why do I shoot? What keeps me going? Does any of this matter at all?
They never come at the right moment — usually right after a frame that makes you think: yes, that’s it. Then time passes and I’m not so sure. Or worse, after a whole batch where nothing came together, everything’s flat, and you start to suspect you’re just adding a few more pointless pictures to the world.
Since then I’ve thought a lot about the second before the button.
Why does one thing out of thousands suddenly stop us? Why do we raise the camera? And why can’t we explain afterwards what it was we saw?
Maybe a photograph happens in the gap between the world outside and something inside that suddenly recognises it. Either way, it doesn’t start with the shutter. It starts earlier, and none of that is visible in the picture.
It’s made not of light and shadow but of the person doing the looking.
Over time I noticed that photographs interest me less than the people who make them. The visual language is visible, the body of work is visible. What they grew out of isn’t.
The questions, meanwhile, never went away. They piled up over the years, one at a time, usually at the wrong moment — in the middle of shooting, or when there was nothing to shoot at all.
Fourteen of them. I didn’t invent them at a desk — these are the ones that stayed.
That’s where Fourteen Frames came from: the same fourteen questions, put to photographers whose work I know and follow. I’m not asking because I know the answers. I’m asking because I don’t.
A conversation about photography doesn’t always fit into a quick answer. The deeper questions take time. Caught off guard in a spoken interview, people make a joke of it or change the subject. Writing gives you room to slow down, come back to the question, and throw out the first convenient thought.
Sometimes doubt turns out to be more honest than certainty. Answering all fourteen isn’t required. One person answered three, and three turned out to be more than enough.
A roll of film has thirty-six frames. I have fourteen: enough to see how a photographer thinks, few enough that every answer counts. The answers don’t add up to a conclusion. They argue with each other, and sometimes with me. That’s the point.
Every next frame still starts with one of these questions. Usually at the wrong moment.
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