Drifting with my daughter

Since the birth of our fourth child, Rebeka, my days have unfolded in slow walks through Tallinn. I leave home to shoot the street, but return with fragments: still lifes, odd details, small discoveries that happen only at her pace.

This is not only my project. It is also my daughter’s. Thanks to her.

Walking with a child can be exhausting — I’ve felt that too. She is, after all, the fourth child I’m raising. I see young mothers pushing strollers with blank faces, heads down, eyes on their phones. It isn’t necessarily escapism. It might be ordering a new snowsuit because autumn arrived. It might be paying bills. It might be anything.

Our first three children came one after another while I was working full-time as a theatre lighting master. For years I ran between work and home with no time to breathe. I didn’t even know I was allowed to have time of my own. Of course I burned out. My wife did too. I left the theatre. And for more than six years I didn’t touch a camera. Mine had died — the tiny internal battery failed, the kind you can’t just replace. I missed it. I missed it constantly. But I had no time.

This project is not just walking with my daughter through a car-centred city.
It is also the story of a nearly middle-aged white man trying to befriend his camera again.
This camera. The Nikon D750 — not the best, something I’ll have to replace one day, but not today. Today it does what I need. I’ve also found my favourite lenses. Full frame — new lenses are expensive. So I went backwards. Back to where so many things began: the Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8 AI-S and the Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 AI-S. Wonderful lenses. Incredibly slow. Everything is manual, but where am I rushing? Only diapers require speed.

One more thing: everything here is straight out of the camera. No editing, not even cropping.
I prefer to “waste” time behind the camera rather than in front of a computer.
And if I’m allowed some pathos, this is my way of honouring all the analogue photographers whose work has become iconic over decades — and will remain so. Created within the limitations of film, which gave their worlds so much character.

I go out thinking I’m doing street photography, yet I always return with something in between — a threshold space. Like the threshold between the two memorials. These liminal places create tension for me.

For some reason, with a camera in my hand, I often look away from the event. I’ve always done that. I’ve felt guilt and embarrassment for it. I am not a “real” photographer. Real photographers cover important things. Famine. War. Drama. Important subjects — not emptiness, not silence, not mistakes.

Every photograph here has something wrong in it. And that is fine.
I value those mistakes.
Just as I value the spaces I walk through.

I do not shout. I do not demand. I simply observe the world, trying to disturb it as little as possible, sometimes even afraid to wake it up. This is how I discover the space around me — as much as I’m allowed, at the pace I’m allowed.

This is a small selection from a project that has lasted more than a year and will continue.
I don’t know for how long.
But that isn’t the important part.
There will be another one when this one ends.