The casual kiss

The Casual Kiss - Brick Lane, London, 2023.

I had already walked past them.

It wasn’t a planned photograph. Just a group standing close in the street. Ordinary. Almost invisible against the architecture and movement around them.

Something made me turn back. It was the graffiti painted car that caught my eye.

I lifted the camera (Canon Powershot G7 mark 2) and pressed the shutter. One frame. Then I moved on.

Only later, reviewing the image, did it reveal what it was really about.

This photograph isn’t about romance. It’s about placement.

They are small within the frame. Surrounded by lines, surfaces, perspective, and colour. The built environment stretches beyond them. Yet their connection becomes more pronounced.

This is what I mean by Emotional Topography.

How environments shape, frame and sometimes amplify human behaviour.

The city is not neutral. Architecture creates distance, channels movement, and defines exposure. Public space carries its own psychology. Rules of conduct, degrees of visibility, a sense of performance, or absence.

And yet, within that structured space, something deeply human happens.

The kiss is casual was not staged. It is almost lost in its surroundings. But because it happens there, within that scale and geometry, it becomes interesting and real.

The image holds two maps at once:

The physical map. Lines, depth, colour, surface, scale.

And the emotional map. Connection, vulnerability, and intimacy in public.

When processing the final image, I resisted dramatics. No heavy post edit corrections. The depth was already present in the layers of space. My role was simply to reveal it.

What interests me is not spectacle. It is how ordinary moments shift when placed within larger systems. How a simple gesture can interrupt structure, soften architecture, and briefly humanise the impersonal.

I nearly walked past it. That, too, is part of the topography.