Categories
Photo Essay Photography

Snippets of Paris (2025/2026)

Snippets reflect the transitory experiences we have when passing through scenes, places, and times with people that are fragmentary and atomistic pieces of a greater whole.

My Parisian snippets evoke elements of my own visual grammar, but if they represent anything, it is an attempt to recover from a form of self-alienation that developed over the latter part of 2025.

While a shared grammar connects these images, they resist coherence beyond the internal logic of that language. They do not advance a unified narrative or claim to describe Paris as such. The photographs were not made according to a plan or strategy, nor in service of a particular story.

Instead, each image emerged from extended photographic walkabouts, where movement itself was the method, and each step was taken in the hope of returning to myself. On returning from Paris, I could at least see myself again, even if I was still not yet fully walking in my own shoes.

Voie Georges Pompidou & Pont D’Arcole, Paris, 2025
Place du Carrousel, Paris, 2026
Place du Tertre & Rue du Calvaire, Paris, 2025
Pont Des Arts & Grande Rue 22 Sentier du Mont Saint-Michel, Paris, 2025
Rue du Colonel Driant & Rue Du Lovre, Paris, 2025
Rue Des Martyrs & Rue Lamartine, Paris, 2025
Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor & Port des Champs Elysées, Paris, 2025
Rue Faobourg Saint-Denis & Boulevard de Magenta, Paris, 2025
Rue Norvins & Rue Des Saules, Paris, 2025
Rue la Fayette & Rue de Dunkerque, Paris, 2025
Rue la Fayette & Rue Du Faubourg Poissonnière, Paris, 2025
Place du Tertre & Rue Du Mont-Cenis, Paris, 2025
Rue de Rivoli & Place du Carrousel, Paris, 2026
Quai Jacques Chirac & Avenue De Suffren, Paris, 2026
Rue Pierre de Nolhac & Rue Des Récollets (Palace of Versailles), Versailles, 2026
Rue du Douai & Rue Blanche, Paris, 2025
Rue Halévy & Rue Auber, Paris, 2026
Charles de Gaulle, Paris, 2026

All images made using a Leica Q2 or an iPhone 17 Pro, and lightly edited using Darkroom and/or Apple Photos. An extended version of this series was first published on Glass.

About Me

Christopher Parsons an amateur Toronto-based documentary and street photographer, and has been making images for over a decade. His monochromatic photographs focus on little moments that happen on the streets and which record the ebb and flow of urban life over the course of years and decades.

His work often tries to capture the urban landscape from unfamiliar perspectives and routinely focuses on attention to small and transient details of his environments. Rather than pursuing individuals on the streets he focuses on the backdrops of the urban environment and how subjects live their lives passing through them.

His work has been highlighted on Ted Forbes’ YouTube Channel, The Art of Photography, on the Photowalk Show podcast hosted by Neale James, as well by the Glass social media platform.

Outside of photography, Christopher has worked on high-profile national and international privacy, data security, and national security issues. He is currently employed at a government data privacy and transparency regulator.

Categories
Photo Essay Photography

Snippets of Montevideo (2025)

Snippets reflect the transitory experiences we have when passing through scenes, places, and times with people that are fragmentary and atomistic pieces of a great whole.

Snippets of Montevideo was made in November of 2025 while having just a few hours to make images and remember the light that was falling on the city and its people. The story it tells is merely that of light and people at a given time – a few hours that people were illuminated with the energy of the sun, radiating that light back onto the camera sensor that has frozen milliseconds of their life.

Montevideo, Uruguay, 2025
Soriano & Andes, Montevideo, 2025
Soriano & Julio Herrera Y Obes, Montevideo, 2025
Guarani & Washington, Montevideo, 2025
Montevideo, Uruguay, 2025
25 de Mayo & Zabala, Montevideo, 2025
Av 18 de Julio & Julio Herrera y Obes, Montevideo, 2025
Convencion & Avenida 18 de Julio, Montevideo, 2025
Rio Brance & Avindia 18 De Julio, Montevideo, 2025
Avenida Italia & Eduardo Victor Haedo, Montevideo, 2025

All images made using a Fuji x100F or an iPhone 17 Pro, and lightly edited using Darkroom and/or Apple Photos. This series was first published on Glass.

About Me

Christopher Parsons an amateur Toronto-based documentary and street photographer, and has been making images for over a decade. His monochromatic photographs focus on little moments that happen on the streets and which record the ebb and flow of urban life over the course of years and decades.

His work often tries to capture the urban landscape from unfamiliar perspectives and routinely focuses on attention to small and transient details of his environments. Rather than pursuing individuals on the streets he focuses on the backdrops of the urban environment and how subjects live their lives passing through them.

His work has been highlighted on Ted Forbes’ YouTube Channel, The Art of Photography, on the Photowalk Show podcast hosted by Neale James, as well by the Glass social media platform.

Outside of photography, Christopher has worked on high-profile national and international privacy, data security, and national security issues. He is currently employed at a government data privacy and transparency regulator.

Categories
Photography

Reflecting on My Photography Contest Submissions

When listening to photography podcasts, it’s apparent that photography contests are deeply polarizing: some see them as effective ways to share work, while others view them as generally not credible ways of presenting it.

For myself, the act of submitting work to a contest provides a focused opportunity to review it and think about it more deliberately than is typical. I’m not often staring at one of my images and trying to determine what it is actually communicating. The act of such reflection is, in my mind, worth the cost of admission in its own right.

Over the past few months, I’ve submitted to a couple of contests. Below, organized under their respective names, I share the photos and how I described them.

Categories
Photography Writing

Using Moriyama’s Style Without His Philosophy

(Augusta & Baldwin, Toronto, 2026)

I don’t use my Ricoh GRiiix all that much but, decided to take it with me while out with my partner and shoot in its hard contrast profile that mimics Daidō Moriyama’s style.1

He’s one of my favourite photographers; while I really like his images, it’s the philosophy underlying them that truly attracts me. His use of “are, bure, boke”, which is often translated as “grainy/rough, blurry, out-of-focus,” was, in part, an aesthetic opposition to the European photojournalism style. This style tended toward a more realist presentation of the world. What he developed wasn’t just a visual style, but a way of seeing and positioning oneself in relation to the world writ large.

I’m…not shooting with Moriyama’s philosophy. I approach image making from a different perspective that lacks his particular philosophical guidestones. And so this image is experimental, for me, but the experiment is this: what is it like to use a photographer’s so-called “style” that is really an outward (and visually manifested) expression of their values and positionally, when making one’s own images?

This isn’t an image that will do much aside from torturing a few electrons to position bits in this way or that, and only to be seen by a handful of people. But as an experiment in a way of making an image, I find it deeply uncomfortable.

My discomfort stems from this mode being available on Ricoh cameras at all. Specifically, it seems to reduce a so-called “style” — which is really a philosophy — to a selectable profile in a camera. To me, this results in a flattening of what was originally a deliberate and mindful photographic practice, with the effect of subverting or consuming a way of making images and entirely eliding the rationale that undergirds this “style” in the first place.

My perception doesn’t extend to profiles that replicate film stocks, since photographers have historically used film stocks in highly individual ways. But Moriyama’s way of making images was distinctive, and this mode feels uncomfortably close to reproducing that specificity.

I know that many people love the hard contrast mode on Ricoh cameras, and can make really beautiful images with it. But it feels uncomfortable to me, and I don’t see myself using it very often going future.


  1. This blog is developed from an earlier, and shorter, analysis of this experiment on Glass. ↩︎
Categories
Photo Essay Photography

Vacation Street Photography Challenge

(Come Towards the Light by Christopher Parsons)

This year I took a very late vacation while Toronto was returning to its new normal. I’ve been capturing the city throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and I wanted to focus in on how the streets felt.

During the pandemic we’ve all been attached to our devices, and our phones in particular, and thus decided to document the city through the lens of our ever-present screen: the smartphone. I exclusively shot with my iPhone 12 Pro using the Noir filter. This filter created a strong black and white contrast, with the effect of deepening shadows and blacks and lifting highlights and whites. I choose this, over a monotone, as I wanted to emphasize that while the city was waking up there were still stark divides between the lived experiences of the pandemic and a continuation of strong social distancing from one another.

95% of my photos were captured using ProRaw with the exception of those where I wanted to utilize Apple’s long exposure functionality in the Photos application.

Darkroom Settings

In excess of the default Noir filter, I also created a secondary filter in Darkroom that adjusted what came off the iPhone just a bit to establish tones that were to my liking. My intent was to make the Noir that much punchier, while also trying to reduce a bit of the sharpness/clarity that I associate with Apple’s smartphone cameras. This adjustment reflected, I think, that digital communications themselves are often blurrier or more confused than our face-to-face interactions. Even that which seems clear, when communicated over digital systems, often carries with it a misrepresentation of meaning or intent.