Work on this book started long ago and in its final form, as is so often the case, it only partly reflects the original concept.

What was initially conceived as a report, a presentation of the photographer’s creative achievements, evolved by degrees into an investigation of the art-form itself — ​into the nature of street photography, of the specific features and limitations of the genre, of its subjects and contexts. An investigation that is purely visual, requiring no words and presupposing no surprising revelations, an investigation that deals with a number of things that are easily understood but which demand that from time to time they be taken up and thought about again in order to be understood once more.

An investigation of the idea, for instance, that street photography is not a genre but a form of observational practice. That the ‘street’ of the street photographer can hardly be classed in the category of urban spaces and indeed is probably not even a physical space of any kind. That the reality of the street — ​a vast stage filled to bursting with events and people, every ­second generating the substance of ‘the decisive moment’ — ​is a reality that interests the street photographer only in as far as it represents a complex metaphor for time.

For the key here lies in something that did not exist before the photographer started to shoot, something that emerges, takes on flesh and manifests itself in the process of concentrated observation, to some degree influenced by the photographer’s gaze, even because of it. Releasing the shutter, the street photographer does not so much capture some central episode in an unfolding action as literally stop time: thanks to this ­sudden halt, through the folds and creases of the apparent there emerges for but a moment a more profound reality — ​the hyper-reality of invention, if you will.

Of itself the street — ​a picturesque variety of human faces and bodies, a geometry of shop-windows and adverts, of bridges and lamp-posts, street-markings and traffic — ​seems like the fundamental precondition for this observational practice but in essence it means little. A few nudist neighbours and an empty Crimean beach or a child’s travels through the microcosm of a single apartment are equally inexhaustible sources of subject matter. Geography is a conventional concept. The body of Georgia O’Keeffe was just as inexhaustible a source for Alfred Stieglitz as were Fifth Avenue or Central Park for Garry Winogrand. In the end, the street is nothing more than a metaphysical body.

Danila Parniouk’s photographs in this book were taken in Warsaw and Paris, New York and Moscow, Florence and Barcelona, on the untamed beaches of the Crimea and the shores of Gokarna, at a Manhattan crossroads and in a quiet courtyard in Vilnius, in the halls of the Hermitage and amidst the butchers’ stalls of a Minsk market.

This is a grand, exotic journey. But the photographs are consistently un-exotic: it seems as if, even in the most farflung towns and lands, the photographer is shooting the same people, people who, despite differences in skin colour or the shape of their eyes, seem related or at least familiar.

These are streets on which no adventures happen, where the characters — ​beggars, monks, girls in the Tokyo metro, boys of Nepal or Minsk, holy cows and feral dogs — ​all seem identical, unhurried, apparently frozen in these breathtaking tableaux vivants even before the camera shutter was released.

This is a book about how all streets on earth meet and intersect.