The Street Feels like Home

I know it must sound strange coming from someone of the most quintessentially petit bourgeois background, but when I’m out at night— whether I’m walking around with friends, by myself taking pictures, or simply just existing in the city late I night— I genuinely feel more at home than nearly anywhere else on this Earth. There’s a certain perspective that a busy late-night street can give you. It is almost as if you are observing the most raw, most unfiltered human experience. Being honest with ourselves, nobody really “tailors” themself to be observed at 12:09am. Whoever comes out at that time— that is the real person you’re seeing. Perhaps it’s that honesty that makes the late-night street feel like home. Perhaps it’s the fact that whomever you’re observing, you are seeing the “truest” version of them— at least to my eyes. 

There’s another piece to why the street, however. The honesty is bidirectional. Out late at night, sitting on a street corner watching the passers-by— I genuinely feel as free as I believe I am capable of feeling. I would say that I am most genuinely myself in those moments. Canal Street at 12:00am is probably one of very few places that a non-passing trans girl can sit on a street corner wearing shorts and a sports bra and somehow be one of the more “normal”-looking people in a space. This feeling certainly goes beyond simple aesthetics, however. When I am out on the street, simply existing and observing, it is almost as if every defect and distortion of my mind has been corrected. There are no deadlines on Canal Street at 12:00am— no assignments to skip, no tasks to forget. All that exists is you and absolutely everything around you— the abstract collapses into the immediate… more literally, into the concrete. 

It’s a good few hours later as I’m writing this paragraph. I’ve gotten some sleep, and I’ll shortly return to the institutions of status to which some would say I “belong.” But I cannot for the life of me escape the call of the street. Being out late at night, taking pictures on the street, it really feels like home in a way that little can describe. Beyond the freedom of identity— beyond the solitude of night— there’s a feeling that everyone around me is “my people.” From the kind to the outright hostile, the feeling of Canal Street at 12:09am feels as if I have just arrived at a chaotic family gathering.

I fear that may touch on why I take pictures to begin with. Ereyesterday, I wrote a brief entry in my journal on why I take photographs, and I included this line:

  “I want to capture or show what it means to love even the most mundane aspects of life. I want to photograph people who are just... living. And I want to communicate how whimsical and beautiful it is to just live.”^[[1]]

That could seem to be a rather “generic” motivation for taking pictures, but we must be dialectical about the thing. Within this general “slogan” for taking pictures, there exists a particular feeling: whimsy. Now, I wouldn’t say that my night photos are particularly whimsical in the colloquial sense. They are harsh, stark, and sharp as these streets can sometimes be. They lack the pastel colors and bright childlike glow that traditionally “whimsical” images seem to have. But what they do have, most certainly, is life. I would say that they capture life at is most whimsical — when we take into account the following definition of whim:

“a capricious or eccentric and often sudden idea or turn of the mind”^[[2]]

The decision to go out onto the streets of New Orleans at near-midnight, taking pictures of everyone and everything that is ostensibly not the most photogenic, is almost incontestably an eccentric and sudden turn of the mind. One does not go out onto Canal Street at 12:09am and live amongst the people because they planned it and thought it out. They do it because they are compelled to. And I suppose that is the fact that that is where my mind turns— or perhaps returns— that makes the nighttime street feel like home. The whimsy is in the ability to see life— in the ability to capture what it feels like just to see... people. Not institutions, not abstractions, not “causes,” but simply people.

^[1] My personal journal, written September 6, 2026

^[2] Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “whim,” accessed September 8, 2026, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whim.