Daniel Bellman: The search for the extraordinary in the ordinary of the streets

How old are you? Where do you currently live and work?

I am 47, live and work in New York City.

Tell us about your journey in photography. When did you start photographing and why? What role does photography play in your life?

From a young age, I felt a deep curiosity for cameras, often playing with my Dad’s equipment. This fascination intertwined with my natural tendency to wander, to drift alone through urban environments. Photography became a trusted companion to these explorations. As my passion grew, I found inspiration in the works I encountered in photo books and galleries, where the images of great masters revealed the transformative power of the medium.

I like to think of street photography as something like dowsing, where you walk over unknown ground guided by intuition and fate in search of chance events to be imbued with form and meaning, hoping that the collision of fortuity and intent will deliver a spark. After indulging for years a habit of taking my camera out for a walk with no apparent reason other than engaging in this random search, I realized that a coherent body of work was spontaneously taking shape, much like foliage sprouting from a tree.

That coherence seems rooted in the belief that beneath the mundane surface of everyday life lies a subtle, transcendent layer that breathes meaning into our existence, a dimension often overlooked in an era marked by distraction and disenchantment. In this sense, I would say that my work strives to offer a chance to rediscover the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Tell us about your finalist work for the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025. When and where was it created? What is its concept? How does it fit into your photographic practice?

The photographs of this series were instinctively taken at different times and places without a specific concept in mind, in the same way as my body of work has taken shape overall not through a deliberate search, but through a process of slow accumulation and selection. To me these figures toiling away carry a layered significance that fits my photographic practice.

On a visual level, their anonymity and physicality as they toil away or take a break is a candid reminder that everyday life, while culturally dominated by the promises of the digital technology, is still firmly anchored to a tangible reality of struggle and fatigue. And on a metaphorical level, they seem to evoke the myth of Sisyphus, who relentlessly goes on pushing the rock up the hill. I find the struggle of every Sisyphus-like individual in these photographs moving and inspiring, in that while each one of them, or us, has to carry their burden on their own, it is indeed this universal effort that unites us as humans.

What projects are you currently working on? What are your near-future plans for photographic production?

As a result of a habit to release the shutter only when disparate elements within the frame align in a way that resonates with my inner sense of order, my compositions tend to be marked by a refusal of visual noise, favoring instead a play of forms that suggests a deeper coherence.

While this kind of approach is well-suited for analog photography, where each frame must be considered, I am aware that it can impose limitations and repetitions that I intend to overcome by making an effort to allow for greater freedom in my street photography.

By welcoming unpredictability, imperfection, and rawness, I am confident that my future photographic production will be imbued with a deeper degree of humanistic and spiritual significance, which I believe to be the highest and ultimate goal of the art of street photography.