Imperfection as Practice
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante.
This morning I wanted to talk about this idea of imperfection in street photography.
If you head over to my website, http://dantesisofo.com, and click on the Flux tab, it’ll open up my archive from the past three years—photographing in high-contrast black and white. There’s a timeline where you can go to any month, any day, open the images, and move through the photographs.
I actually have all of these photos sitting on my desk right now, and I’ve been going through them. As I look at the images and think about my new work—how I’ve transitioned from color to black and white, and even just the mindset behind how I shoot—everything feels simplified and streamlined. I’m openly embracing imperfection in the frames I make. I’m not trying to rationally control anything when I’m photographing.
The Camera in the Pocket
The more I think about this practice, the more I realize that the purest form of artistic expression I can completely immerse myself in daily is simply having the Ricoh GR in my front right pocket, pulling it out, turning it on, and pressing the shutter at whatever I’m doing and whatever I see—responding intuitively from my gut instinct and disregarding the rational mind.
It’s about embracing spontaneity. Embracing serendipity.
By boosting the contrast to the maximum, I’m removing control from myself as the photographer and treating myself almost like a vessel for the medium—the medium of photography. I find that to be a radical notion. A radical approach to making pictures.
A Bodily Experience
I think the idea of being a photographer often becomes grandiose. You put your photography hat on, wipe your lens down, and go out there to tell visual stories. But really, the act of making pictures is a somatic experience. It’s a bodily experience.
It’s recognizing patterns in nature and human behavior. Feeling the sun on your skin. Feeling your feet moving on concrete. The sounds. The sights. The smells.
That’s what channels through me when I’m on the street photographing.
I embrace that bodily experience openly, and I respond intuitively from that gut feeling—the instinct to press the shutter. That’s where my inspiration comes from. It’s the embodied experience of everyday, mundane life.
Letting Go of Control
By making snapshots—by photographing and responding intuitively to whatever I’m doing—I’m not thinking rationally about the control I can impose on a composition. And I find that incredibly liberating.
It’s the purest way I know how to express myself creatively.
By embracing imperfection, not only do I express myself more authentically through the photographs I make, but the act itself becomes liberating. It genuinely brings joy into my everyday life. I become a more joyous, happier, more jolly person simply by letting go.
I think the ultimate peak experience is when you’re in the act—out in the world, making images—when you enter flow. You forget everything you think you know. You exist outside of time. You’re fully present, immersed in the bodily experience of life.
Style Arrives on Its Own
This leads me to think about style. We often define style through aesthetics—film stocks, shutter speeds, color versus black and white. But the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that style isn’t an aesthetic decision at all.
Style arrives with time.
Style emerges from the subconscious.
When you liberate yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually—and move through the world embracing imperfection—your unique voice begins to surface naturally. Your style becomes a reflection of what you’re drawn to, what you notice, and what you place within the four corners of the frame.
Style isn’t forced. It’s revealed.
It comes from letting go of control and tapping into that irrational, intuitive side of being.
Learning the Rules to Break Them
At the same time, I’ve been reflecting on my previous approach—shooting with layers, using rational control, trying to make the best photographs. That reflection led me to put together a free online course on my website: Mastering Layering in Street Photography.
While I now embrace imperfection and breaking rules, I still believe it’s critical to understand the fundamentals. Learning the rules allows you to break them consciously. A strong foundation opens creative freedom.
The course includes a companion PDF, a 22-minute introductory lecture, and a full curriculum with modules and lessons. Inside, you’ll find text, images, POV behind-the-scenes videos, contact sheets, and annotated photographs where I break down compositions and structure.
Layering isn’t about stacking complexity. It’s about structure. It’s about relationships within the frame. When I finished putting the course together, I realized that layering is really just foundational composition—street photography 101.
Going With the Flow
So yeah—embrace imperfection. Let go of control. Detach from outcomes. Because once you stop trying to say something, that’s when you actually do.
Cheers.