"So What Makes Something Worthy of a Photo?"

I’m walking through Soho in London with friends on a sunny afternoon in June. It’s 2022, I’ve just met Matty Healy on the street, I’m riding a high. We’re making our way to dinner after an afternoon criticizing the British Museum, and I snap a quick photo of a ledge of a building.

My friend Hadley, an archaeologist, points to my film camera and asks — “So, what makes something worthy of that?”

Truly, in the moment I didn’t have an eloquent answer. I probably said something along the lines of “I don’t know, whatever catches my eye” which is, in a way, true, but not entirely the point. There were three of us there, all with eyes seeing the same sights, but only a few scenes made me want to wind my camera and snap again. What made a moment “worthy?”

I didn’t think much more of it at the time, but the question resurfaces for me every time I get a new roll developed.

This past May, I was in Paris with my friend Paige wandering Montmartre looking for a spot to eat. I remembered Le Consulat was around the corner and wanted to take a quick photo — I had snapped a pic there in 2019 and wanted to see how much I could recreate it. This time there were hundreds of people around, swarming the streets, hustling to get their shot in front of La Maison Rose or a seat at a table. Here’s a realistic iPhone photo of the moment, for reference.

But at the center of it all was this bride and groom having coffee on their wedding day.

The truth is, I have thousands of photos on my phone from this trip, and I’ve barely looked back at them. But this one is different — I was patient, unhurried, and observing. I saw her reach for his face and caught them at just the right time.

When you shoot film, you get 36 frames. To some, this may seem confining or stressful, but to me it’s freeing. It forces you to slow down. You can’t check a screen to see if you caught the light right or if someone was blinking. It trains you to notice when a moment is worth keeping.

So, Hadley, if you're reading — here's my real answer. It's not the building, or the café, or even the bride. It's whatever makes me stop walking.

I’ll leave you with the rest of the film roll from that trip to London — Soho, meeting Matty, and the V&A Museum.