Charles Bergeron’s photography feels like a quiet exercise in attention: lines, textures, color, contrast, and fragments of the natural world are reduced until they become almost meditative abstractions.

Thank you, Pierre Villeneuve, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Drew Doggett’s photographs bring together wilderness, elegance, and an almost mythological sense of presence. What I find especially compelling is how he turns horses, elephants, waves, deserts, and remote cultures into images that feel both monumental and intimate — beautifully composed, rich in texture, and full of quiet power.

Thank you, Henry Marais, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Here is my Sunday thought.

One of the things I love most about photographs is that they never tell us everything.

We see a man passing through the frame. We see the dark shape of his body, slightly blurred, moving quickly across a hard urban background. Behind him, there are windows, stains, walls, fragments of buildings, a strange mixture of order and decay. But we do not really know anything.

We do not know where he is going.
We do not know what he is thinking.
We do not know whether this was a good day, a difficult day, or just another ordinary day.

And maybe that is exactly why the photograph holds our attention.

So much of life is incomplete when we see it. We catch fragments. A face in profile. A gesture. A shadow. A person walking past us on the street. For a second, another human being enters our field of vision, and then disappears again. We will never know their story. We are left only with the shape of their presence.

Photography understands this very well.

It does not need to explain. It does not need to give us the full biography, the full context, the full answer. Sometimes a photograph becomes stronger precisely because it refuses to close the circle. It leaves space for us. It allows us to wonder.

And I think this is also one of the quiet differences between looking and consuming. When we consume images, we want them to be immediately clear. We want the point. The message. The reason. But when we really look at a photograph, we accept that some things will remain unresolved.

This man passed through my frame.
For a fraction of a second, he belonged to the picture.
Then he was gone.

But in the photograph, he is still there — moving, anonymous, unfinished.

And maybe that is enough.

Until next time,
Tomasz

My yesterday’s discovery: Leleo Lopes, Brazilian photographer with a brilliant eye for turning ordinary street scenes into complex little theatres of color, shadow, line, and depth.

What I love most is how his photographs feel both spontaneous and carefully composed at the same time — silhouettes become characters, walls and windows become stages. Every small gesture seems to pull you deeper into the frame.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Gheorghe Popa is a Romanian photographer who is a full-time pharmacist but whose passion is landscape photography. Gheorghe often shoots in locations that are not widely known, at least by photographers in North America.

Most importantly, it is his uncanny way of experiencing and seeing nature that results in his sophisticated and original compositions.

Today’s recommendation comes from Olaf Sztaba, co-editor of ELEMENTS.

Until next time,
Tomasz

ELEMENTS is a beautifully designed monthly digital magazine devoted to the finest landscape photography, combining carefully curated portfolios, in-depth interviews, and thoughtful editorial content for photographers who want both substance and inspiration.

The experience allows you to stand alongside a photographer in the field as they see and craft their image.

Rachael Talibart writes: “What is fascinating is that no single wave will be exactly the same as any other wave that has existed since the beginning of time.” Rachael has spent a lifetime witnessing and capturing the power of the ocean, resulting in mesmerizing and powerful black and white imagery.

When you look at her images, you can feel the wind and the droplets of water splashing on your face. You stand in awe and walk away with respect and admiration for one of the most powerful forces in nature and Rachael’s ability to capture it.

Today’s recommendation comes from Olaf Sztaba, co-editor of ELEMENTS.

Until next time,
Tomasz

ELEMENTS is a beautifully designed monthly digital magazine devoted to the finest landscape photography, combining carefully curated portfolios, in-depth interviews, and thoughtful editorial content for photographers who want both substance and inspiration.

The experience allows you to stand alongside a photographer in the field as they see and craft their image.

For those of you familiar with Christopher Burkett’s work, you will know he is one of the most iconic landscape photographers known for his large format Cibachrome prints. Christopher bought the entire remaining supply of Cibachrome paper and spent decades perfecting his skills to create one-of-a-kind prints. You will find them in the most prestigious galleries in the world and recognize them by their luminosity, depth, and aliveness.

Make sure to check out the series called Visiting Christopher Burkett, in which Christopher shares his life story and describes his techniques, behind-the-scenes details of his craft, and his fascination with printing.

Today’s recommendation comes from Olaf Sztaba, co-editor of ELEMENTS.

Until next time,
Tomasz

ELEMENTS is a beautifully designed monthly digital magazine devoted to the finest landscape photography, combining carefully curated portfolios, in-depth interviews, and thoughtful editorial content for photographers who want both substance and inspiration.

The experience allows you to stand alongside a photographer in the field as they see and craft their image.

Theo Bosboom focuses on things we often step on, pass by, or simply ignore, whether he dips his camera in a local pond to look up at floating leaves from below, or crawls in the grass!

When you go to Theo’s website and savour his work, you step into a world of creativity and vision unlike any other.

What is even more impressive is that his intimate landscapes are mostly shot in locations close to home. I guess we have no more excuses to travel to exotic locations to shoot unique landscapes.

Today’s recommendation comes from Olaf Sztaba, co-editor of ELEMENTS.

Until next time,
Tomasz

ELEMENTS is a beautifully designed monthly digital magazine devoted to the finest landscape photography, combining carefully curated portfolios, in-depth interviews, and thoughtful editorial content for photographers who want both substance and inspiration.

The experience allows you to stand alongside a photographer in the field as they see and craft their image.

With the plethora of photography available, it is rare to find landscape imagery that is genuine, yet fresh and surprising. Xuan-Hui Ng sees landscape in a way no one else can. She taps deeply into her emotions and life experience to see the landscape in a unique, personal way, resulting in imaginative and cleverly crafted images.

Prepare for a very special experience!

Today’s recommendation comes from Olaf Sztaba, co-editor of ELEMENTS.

Until next time,
Tomasz

ELEMENTS is a beautifully designed monthly digital magazine devoted to the finest landscape photography, combining carefully curated portfolios, in-depth interviews, and thoughtful editorial content for photographers who want both substance and inspiration.

The experience allows you to stand alongside a photographer in the field as they see and craft their image.

I regularly contact photographers featured on PHOTOSNACK and ask them to share their spontaneous thoughts, observations, reflections, or advice.

Today, I am sharing the message I received from Richard Bernabe.

Richard Bernabe

Mystery: The Photographer’s Secret Weapon

There’s a paradox at the heart of great photography: what you choose not to show is often more powerful than what you reveal. In an age of oversharing and instant gratification, mystery has become the photographer’s most undervalued tool. The unseen, the suggested, and the ambiguous can transform a literal photograph into an expressive one that haunts us long after we’ve looked away.

Human beings are hardwired to complete incomplete patterns. When we encounter mystery in a photograph, whether it’s an animal partially hidden in grass, a doorway opening into darkness, or a trail disappearing over the horizon, we lean in closer. We linger. We construct visual narratives to fill in what’s missing. An image that explains everything might provide immediate gratification, but it’s also likely to be forgotten as quickly as it was understood.

Photography inherited the use of mystery from centuries of artistic wisdom. Hemingway’s iceberg theory held that deeper meaning should remain hidden beneath the surface. The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile has captivated viewers for five centuries because it can never be fully understood. The shark in Jaws is terrifying partly because we see it so rarely. Music understands that silence creates meaning. The pauses between notes and the unresolved chord generate resonance that full resolution never could.

Hiding or withholding parts of a scene taps into a primal impulse: our need to complete what’s missing. The human mind assigns more weight to the unknown than to the known. This is why a partially hidden lion in the grass feels more chilling than one standing in clear sight. When a photograph suggests rather than declares, the viewer draws upon their own emotional reservoir to complete the story. The phantom bear living in the viewer’s imagination endures far longer than any portrait of the bear itself could.

Ambiguity is mystery’s closest cousin. A leopard staring beyond the frame might evoke superiority or fear, hunger, or threat. These possibilities transform the viewer from a passive observer into an active co-creator, bringing their own experiences and desires to the image. That collaboration is what gives ambiguous images their true staying power.

Creating mystery means exercising tools you likely already possess: shadows, negative space, shallow depth of field, partial framing, backlighting, fog, and rain. The decisive moment works precisely because it asks more questions than it answers.

The need for mystery has grown more urgent in the age of AI-generated imagery. What AI cannot possess is mystery itself, a signature of human intentionality and evidence that deliberate choices were made about what to reveal and what to hide.

The images that truly stay with us are mysterious and remain slightly out of reach. That is where photography transcends documentation and becomes art.

Richard Bernabe was featured in PHOTOSNACK #825.

Through Sunday Editions, I occasionally connect you with photographers whose work you previously explored through PHOTOSNACK.

I want to reveal some authentic parts of the people behind the cameras. I don't ask them any specific questions. I ask them to share whatever comes to mind when they think about YOU, the newsletter readers. It makes their responses genuine and personal.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Jan Erik Waider’s work feels incredibly vivid and immersive. He takes ice, water, snow, and volcanic terrain and turns them into photographs that are both majestic and almost abstract.

There’s so much precision in the way he sees, but also so much wonder, and that mix makes the images feel fresh, powerful, and genuinely unforgettable.

Thank you, John Minkowskyj, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Jeff Zaruba’s work combines landscape-based imagery with digitally constructed compositions, often using repetition, duplicate layers, and mirroring to create symmetrical forms. His photographs tend to move away from straight description and toward more graphic, meditative images shaped by pattern, reflection, and formal balance.

Thank you, Richard Heckler, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Paul Byrne strips the landscape down to its essential forms, and that restraint gives his photographs a quiet, meditative strength.

His use of black and white, long exposure, and simplified scenes feels less like documenting a place and more like turning it into something distilled, minimal, and deeply felt.

Thank you, Stephen Smith, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Gregory Crewdson turns ordinary places into something strange, cinematic, and deeply unsettling. His photographs feel quiet and beautiful, but always charged with mystery.

Thank you, David Hollenback, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

What I love in Nathaniel Paolinelli’s work is how raw and immediate it feels, yet never distant. He photographs people and places with real closeness, curiosity, and respect.

His images seem rooted in the pulse of New Mexico and its subcultures, but what stays with me most is the humanity in them: tough, tender, and deeply alive.

Thank you, Olivier Prevosto, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Here is my Sunday thought.

A few days ago, I took the photograph above in the fishing town of Marsaxlokk, in Malta.

This image surprised me twice.

The first surprise happened when I saw the scene. I was drawn to it immediately for purely visual reasons: the rough cloth hanging in the foreground, the pointed white form behind it, the dark mass on both sides, the wires cutting across the frame, the old walls, the palm tree, the little pockets of light and shadow. It felt like one of those accidental street arrangements I love most — messy, layered, slightly absurd, and yet somehow held together by form. I was thinking about textures, tension, shapes, contrast. Nothing else.

The second surprise came later, after I shared the photograph.

Some American viewers saw something I had not seen at all: the silhouette of a Ku Klux Klan hood. A few people even called the image provocative. I was genuinely taken aback. Not because I wanted to deny their reading, but because that association had never entered my mind for a second while making or editing the photograph. My attention had gone somewhere completely different.

And that, to me, is fascinating.

We often talk about photographs as if they were clear containers of intention. The photographer sees something, frames it, shares it, and the viewer receives it. But that is not really how photographs work. A photograph may begin with the photographer’s intention, but it never ends there. It travels. It lands in other minds, other histories, other places. It meets memories the photographer does not have. It touches nerves that may not even exist in the photographer’s own cultural world.

A picture is never seen in a vacuum.

It is seen through a life.

An American viewer may carry a very different visual memory than I do. Certain shapes will immediately trigger associations rooted in that country’s history, trauma, violence, and iconography. Someone from somewhere else may see none of that and respond instead to geometry, atmosphere, or symbolism of another kind. Neither reaction is invented out of nowhere. Both are real. Both come from somewhere deep.

This is one of the reasons photography remains so interesting to me. It is not only about what is in front of the lens. It is also about what is already inside the person who looks.

We like to believe that seeing is simple. But seeing is not simple at all. It is filtered through upbringing, education, geography, media, language, fear, memory, religion, politics, family stories, and private experience. The same photograph can appear poetic to one person, threatening to another, and visually neutral to someone else. Not because one person is right and the others are wrong, but because photographs are unstable by nature. They are open forms. They invite projection.

That can be uncomfortable. It can also be humbling.

As photographers, we do not fully control the meanings our images will generate once they leave us. We can be careful. We can be thoughtful. We can be honest. But we cannot completely govern the cultural baggage a viewer brings to the frame. Sometimes a photograph reveals more about the viewer than about the subject. Sometimes it reveals more about the world the image enters than about the world in which it was made.

I find that both unsettling and beautiful.

Unsettling, because it reminds me that photographs are never innocent objects floating above history. Beautiful, because it shows how deeply alive they are. A photograph is not finished when the shutter clicks. In some ways, it begins there. Then it continues inside other people.

And maybe this is worth remembering the next time we feel too certain about what a picture “means.”

Sometimes a photograph is not only a record of what we saw.

It is also a record of who we are when we look.

Until next time,
Tomasz

I like how quiet and reduced Rohan Reilly’s photographs feel. He strips things down to line, tone, and space, and that restraint gives the work a real calm strength.

Minimalism at its very best.

Thank you, Stephen Smith, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Ernest Withers’s photographs feel alive to me because they stand right inside history rather than looking at it from a distance. There is urgency, dignity, and human closeness in the way he documented the Civil Rights Movement, Black life in the South, and the Memphis music scene.

What I really love is that his pictures are not only important records; they still have warmth, rhythm, and presence, which makes them feel deeply human before they feel historical.

Thank you, Robert Dye, for recommending his work.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Terri Weifenbach lets focus drift and light scatter, creating images where clarity is always partial. Foreground and background blur into each other, guided by color and movement rather than sharp detail.

Looking at her photographs kind of feels like watching your eyes adjust to a garden or woods in shifting sunlight.

Until next time,
Tomasz

Susan Burnstine’s work feels like stepping into a dream you can’t fully explain—blurred, haunting, and deeply emotional, with images that seem to come from memory, fear, and the subconscious all at once.

What I love is that this atmosphere never feels artificial; even though she builds many of her own cameras and lenses, the photographs still feel incredibly personal and fragile, as if they were discovered rather than staged.

You can join Susan at the upcoming online symposium organized by Santa Fe Workshops (details below).

Until next time,
Tomasz

A big thank you to Santa Fe Workshops for supporting PHOTOSNACK.

Susan Burnstine moderates the online abstract symposium, Blur in Photography: Perception, Memory, and the Act of Seeing, produced by Santa Fe Workshops. Joined by three internationally recognized artists: Valda Bailey, Bill Armstrong, and Céline Bodin, whose work utilizes blur as an intentional and expressive photographic language, inviting emotion, memory, intuition, and subjective experience into the photographic frame.

Whether you are newly curious about blur in photography or already immersed in experimental or abstract practice, this online event invites you to slow down, see differently, and consider blur not as a loss of clarity, but as a space of expansive possibility.

View Event Details