Street photography offers a continual sense of discovery. For one local man, it’s just a question of keeping walking

It’s not easy being a street photographer at a time when everybody walks around with a (phone) camera. Not only does it make your subjects – i.e. random people – more skittish about being snapped, it also makes it harder to stand out. No-one’s a photographer when everyone’s a photographer.

Antonis Hadjigeorgiou is 27, and perhaps he hasn’t really stood out yet – he wasn’t even sure about photography being his true métier till a few months ago – but he’s getting there, with over 2,000 followers on his Instagram (@tony_hadj). And he’s standing out in a different way too, earning himself quite a specific identity: the young photographer of old Nicosia.

It’s not exactly an official brand. Still, not only did Antonis grow up (unusually, for someone his age) in the walled city, but whenever he goes out to shoot – which he does four or five times a week – he’ll almost always head there, mostly south of the Green Line but sometimes north too. “I don’t find anything interesting to shoot in the rest of Nicosia, in a way. It’s all very modern and… white.”

One photo in particular exemplifies both his style and the “layers of history” contained in the old town. Shot in black-and-white with a long lens (probably the 100mm, his favourite), it shows a compressed conglomeration of elements: old houses in the foreground, a skyscraper – seemingly just behind, though that’s a trompe l’oeil effect – blocking out the sky in the background, then an old man walking with a cane in the extreme foreground.

The old man is a vital detail, Antonis always making sure to add people in his compositions – though he doesn’t stage shots. “Most of the time I set my framing on a place I like, and just wait for someone to fill the frame.”

Sometimes it’s lightning in a bottle, like his other photo from a few weeks ago (it was posted on August 28) of a silhouetted man – possibly a migrant – mopping an alley under the red glare of street lamps, an intensely cinematic image.

This was close to Sarah’s Jazz Bar, he recalls, at around 3am. Antonis was coming home from work, whether at the bar (which is owned by his dad) or his main job at a restaurant.

“I was casually trying some stuff with my camera that night, I wasn’t planning on shooting anything – but I just turned around and saw that guy mopping, and the light behind him. Everything worked.”

Photographer Antonis Hadjigeorgiou

The photo, evocatively shot from a slightly high angle, looks like it was laboured over for hours. In fact it took 10 seconds (“I stopped, shot and left”), and he barely even did any editing.

Street photography is a curiously random business, often a case of being at the right place at the right time. (That said, possibly the most iconic street photo ever – Robert Doisneau’s ‘The Kiss’ – later turned out to have been staged.) When he was younger he’d shoot obsessively, often taking 500 shots in a two-hour session, says Antonis – but now he prefers to take just a couple of snaps of each subject, then move on. “I just want to keep walking.”

Maybe it’s because what makes it so exhilarating is the constant sense of discovery, the anticipation of some perfect image around every corner. Then again, maybe it’s because his time is precious.

It’s easy to feel nostalgic about being 27 – but in fact, like most in his Gen Z cohort, Antonis’ life is far from carefree. He works 60-hour weeks, six days a week, behind the bar at trendy restaurant Bottega Amaro – juggling tables at a busy restaurant is actually surprisingly similar to street photography: “Kind of like a dance, an adrenaline rush” – often finishing around 1am, after which he’ll head downtown (if he can muster the energy) and take a stroll with his camera, finding people – like that migrant with his mop – who could never afford a table at Bottega. It’s no wonder he’s often felt exhausted by the whole process.

“Sometimes the camera felt like a brick. I couldn’t create anything. Actually, from 2023 to ’24, I had a huge period when I didn’t use the camera at all… I just couldn’t.” For a whole year, he was creatively blocked – which, again, goes against the romantic cliché of being young and full of beans. But it’s not so simple.

Antonis studied Biology (at Swansea) for four years. He’s also thriving in the hospitality sector, obsessed with the study of wine in particular. For a while he was hanging out with the proverbial wrong crowd, “just having ‘fun’,” as he says – putting the word in giant quotation marks – and “very, very confused as to what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be”. It’s hard to feel creative with so much going on.

After all, street photography isn’t for everyone. It’s lonely, or at least solitary. It requires detachment, that fly-on-the-wall feeling. It’s a case of turning life into art on the go, from the inside, noticing (and capturing) the beauty everyone else – all those people with the phone cameras – sees without seeing.

Old Nicosia is Antonis’ muse, at least for now. The plan, however, is to move to Athens for a wine course in April, offering a whole new city to explore – and the plan, more broadly, is eventually to become a professional photographer, having finally figured out what he wants to do.

Earlier this year, after all those months of the camera feeling ‘like a brick’, he decided to go out on a shoot again.

It was 5.30pm. He’d just come out of the lunch shift – and “randomly I said ‘OK, let’s go, for old times sake, let’s try to get something’… In my mind, I was going to go for 15 minutes. I ended up shooting for three hours, until my battery ran out”.

Above all, “I felt amazing afterwards – in a way that had been missing from my life… And then after that I never stopped”.

The results appear on his Instagram, a profusion of atmospheric photos from the past few months. A boy watching pigeons in mid-flight. Silhouettes on the beach (not in old Nicosia, for a change). A girl, diamond-framed, descending stairs. A half-lit cyclist, decapitated by the night. The curved pillars under Eleftheria Square.

Each photo is accompanied by some lines of text – and the text beside one in particular, posted on September 17, could serve as a pretty good summary of where Antonis Hadjigeorgiou is at the moment:

“I’ve been circling this for years.
The streets, the light, the people, the pull.
Now I’m in it. Fully.
This is mine.
These are mine.
I see it, I frame it, I share it.
…
Finally doing it –
the way I feel it.”