Odin help me, people don’t like the street photos. They say it’s too raw, too ugly, too soaked in piss and graffiti and the desperate faces of the street. They want their photography pretty, packaged like a goddamn Hallmark card sunsets, lattes, staged smiles in front of murals with hashtags dripping off the frame like cheap perfume. But I didn’t get into this racket to sell greeting cards to the blind. I shoot the jungle as it is: cracked sidewalks, bodies folded under bridges, cardboard signs screaming like modern cave paintings, and the city gnashing its teeth around them.

Street photography isn’t a tourist brochure. It’s blood on the pavement and smoke in your lungs. It’s the unfiltered reality that half the city steps over every morning on their way to artisanal doughnuts and overpriced yoga classes. The homeless, the addicts, the cast-offs with stories etched deeper than any sanitized skyline. They’re not props. They’re the truth. And the truth makes people itch.

So when the polite crowd wrinkles their nose and says, “Why don’t you shoot something nicer?” I laugh. Because “nice” is a con. “Nice” is a filter slapped over decay to make you feel better about ignoring it. The real city is graffiti bleeding across brick walls, human shadows curled into the corners, lives unraveling beneath the neon and the noise. My camera doesn’t ask permission. It drags those ghosts into the light and forces you to look.

You don’t have to like it. Hell, I don’t like it either. But it’s there, and pretending it isn’t is the greatest lie of all.

This is street photography. The streets aren’t clean. They’re not meant to be. And if that bothers you. Good. That means it’s working.