One Hour in One Place

Sunday 1 June 2025, 22:44 by Michiel Heijmans | 2,501 views | 1 comment

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

During a photo walk, you walk about a kilometre an hour with a group. Although I think it's more like 4 kilometres per hour.

You can easily spend hours on the street without photographing anything that sticks with you. Nothing that makes you think: "That could be a good photo." Sometimes that's simply because you walk far too quickly. What if you chose one place and stayed there for an hour?

Keep moving. And then stand still.

The restlessness in street photography may well lie in that constant question: what if there's something more interesting just around the corner? With a constant sense of unease, you wander through a city, and in quiet moments you know you have to speed up. Move on. Keep walking.

When I had just started, I even thought I had to walk at least 20,000 steps a day, just to make sure I had covered every possible place for an interesting photo. Nonsense, of course.

In street photography, you fish and hunt. Fishing for a beautiful subject against that one beautiful background, and hunting for that great setting for that fantastic subject. I'm a hunter. I fish when I want to have a rest.

But what if I turned it around? What if I stayed standing in the same square metre, so to speak, for an hour? What would that hour look like?

I imagine the place isn't too busy. Not the Damrak, not Hoog Catherijne, not Antwerp's Meir. Perhaps the Kloostertuin by the Dom, or that one spot in Amsterdam Oost. The Grote Markt by the town hall. Just enough people for a bit of activity, but not so many that you still get overwhelmed.

You'll see that absolutely nothing happens during the first 20 minutes. A jackdaw pecks absent-mindedly at an old piece of bread, and an orange bike courier passes by. You try a panning shot, but your settings are wrong. Your legs start to fidget, the hunter awakens. And you suppress him.

Surely an hour should be manageable? The weather is fine and you're listening to the latest episode of 30 Minuten Sluitertijd. We always run over a little anyway.

From hunter to observer

As with all things that happen slowly, such as forming a cabinet, you get used to it at some point. You surrender to it. And at that moment, you naturally enter the fisherman's state of mind.

Someone slowly crosses the street. A pigeon takes flight. Two people suddenly stand in the right light. A cat disappears into a doorway. It's only by standing still that you notice how much is actually happening.

In this new state of awareness, everything slows down. You see the layers and learn to predict the movements around you. If that person walks over there, then they have to go that way next. Someone who goes inside will come back out again.

You learn to see the layers in the space. It's as if you go from two-dimensional images to three. A foreground, your subject and the background. Somehow everything seems easier, probably because the pressure of the hunt has disappeared, even if only for a moment.

Suddenly you realise that something is always happening. If you give it time. A child climbs down, a man in a suit walks past.

After an hour, you move on again. I can imagine that you're not finished with this place yet. But know that if you come back here tomorrow, the place will be different again. You realise that you look differently. You understand that you don't have to have been everywhere in a day. Slowing down isn't a bad thing at all. As long as you keep looking.

I often want too much, too quickly. Perhaps you recognise that. Yet you'll really see more things if you give it time. If you give yourself time. Do you dare to spend an hour in one place? I'm curious to see your photos.

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