There’s no trick to it, just the way I tend to see and shoot. Slightly out of focus, letting edges fall away, letting things become less certain. Not quite abstract, but not fully real either.

The more I looked at it, the less it felt like a scene and the more like an impression. Something half-remembered. Familiar, but just out of reach.

Parke Life felt like the right title. A quiet nod to Trent Parke’s White Man.

Trent Parke - White Man

But in the end, it’s just how the world looked to me in that moment, slightly off, and not entirely explainable.

Ren Kobic.

For me it began about a year ago, on a Greek ferry between two islands. It was hot, too hot, and I was killing time on a shaded deck surrounded by people at wobbly metal tables and plastic chairs. Bored, I pulled out my camera. I’d just bought a manual aperture, manual focus lens, hoping to get back a bit of that hands-on feel that modern autofocus tends to take away.

With the preview set to black and white, I started pointing it at anything, coffee cups, chair legs, whatever. Did I mention I was bored? Then I got braver and aimed it at the people nearby. That’s when it happened.

As I slowly turned the focus ring, I hit that sweet spot where the figures weren’t sharp, but they were still recognisable. Suddenly the scene wasn’t about detail, it was about shapes and light, soft edges and uncertainty. It looked dreamlike. Anything could be happening in that frame. And I liked it.

A man came to the metal steps in front of me. I adjusted the focus until the hard edges of the stairs melted away and his body stretched thin, almost unrecognisable. That was it, I was hooked.

When I got home, I looked through those ferry shots. They were unlike anything I’d made before. Only a handful, but enough to plant a seed. I pushed the idea aside at first and went back to my usual landscapes, but it kept tugging at me.

A few months later, I took that little manual lens into the city for some street photography. At first nothing caught my eye. Then I remembered the blur. I switched the camera back to black and white, dialled the focus just shy of sharp, and went hunting for light and shadows. I turned a corner, spotted a church spire, waited for someone to walk past, and caught a lone figure in the frame. Magic.

Since then, I’ve gone back countless times chasing that feeling. Each time, trying to catch something that sits between real and unreal, detail and mystery.

So what’s next?

Honestly, I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. I’ve started a new project, exploring the hidden shapes that appear when people slip through patches of light and shadow. It’s unpredictable, imperfect, and that’s exactly why I love it.

he was already halfway down the path.

No footsteps. No sound but the soft patter on the rain soaked floor.

He never looked back.

Not at the trees. Not at the lights.

Not at the life he might’ve left behind.

Just forward, as if the gloom knew where he was going, and that was enough.

They are together but yet apart.

One carries an umbrella, one I’d glued to their phone, the other walks ahead.

There are no words between them.

No glances.

No urgency, even as the rain begins to fall.

I watch them pass by and fade into the gloom.

No eye contact.
No shift in pace.
No trace left behind.

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I wonder how many moments like this happen every day.
How many almosts.
How many stories never touch.
How often we come so close to seeing each other.

But in this frame there is only distance.
A quiet refusal to collide.
And something in that silence stays with me longer than any conversation ever could.

We were there.
All three of us.
And none of us ever met.

-RK-

But later, looking back, there they were.

A face, Or something close to one.

Softened by blur and distance, barely formed.

Too vague to know, too sharp to forget.

Now I wonder:

Were they really there?

Or did the image invent them?

Have I remembered a stranger, or imagined one?

I don’t know them. They don’t know me.

I keep walking, camera in hand.
Not to capture them, but to remember how it felt:
to face someone without meeting, to be seen and unseen at once.

There are no voices.
Only movement.
Only the strange, silent tension of being a body in someone else’s path.

This is how I experience the city: as a place where light and shadow flicker past, where connection feels just out of reach, where I sometimes feel like I don’t exist at all.
My photography isn’t about documenting.
It’s about feeling.

I blur the frame with movement, with softness, with silence, not to distort reality, but to reveal something deeper.
These images are how I see the world when no one is looking.
Half-dreamed moments. Emotional echoes.
Solitude with motion all around it.

Through this newsletter, I’ll share my photographs, one at a time or in quiet sequences.
Sometimes with words, sometimes without.
Each post is a reflection, a breath, a fragment of something half-remembered.
You’re welcome to bring your own meaning, your own ghosts, your own dreams, in fact, I hope you do.

Thank you for being here.
I may feel invisible out there… but not here.