4: Bruising the Scene – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

The fourth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about a wannabe street photographer standing in a backstreet in Brussels with that itchy feeling something isn’t quite right. I’m not sure where this story came from, exactly. It might have started with the title, with its misleading whiff of body horror, or it might have been inspired by watching too much photography YouTube. YouTube, in case you didn’t know, is full of channels run by people faking it until they make it in their chosen creative field. They’re obliged to talk with great authority, making bold declarations and shocking statements, because the algorithm likes that. But it’s usually painfully clear that they’re not that confident about what they’re saying – especially when they do a video one year on called something like “Why I was totally wrong about…” I’m also amazed at how often they give all sorts of advice about how to take great photos and then cut to a gallery of their pictures, accompanied by…