COVID changed something. Whatever you believe happened during that period, most people came out of it questioning who and what they could trust: governments, companies, the media, social platforms, other people, perhaps even their own understanding of the world.

People became better at recognising when something was being sold to them.

That is partly why user-generated content has become so powerful. It is rarely the most technically impressive content, but it often feels the most believable. It looks like something a real person experienced and chose to share, rather than something an organisation manufactured to persuade us.

Almost every brand, event and destination now faces the same problem:

How do you show people something without making it feel like another advert?

That question sits at the centre of my work.

When I first started photographing festivals, most photographers focused on the artists and enormous crowd shots. The images could be spectacular, but they always confused me slightly.

The person considering buying a ticket would never experience the festival from the photographer’s pit.

They would experience the anticipation, the mud, the ridiculous outfits, the strangers becoming friends and the moment someone forgot anyone else was watching and completely lost themselves in the music.

That was the festival.

I noticed the same thing in motorsport. There were endless photographs of cars travelling around circuits, usually taken from places the average visitor could never access.

But people do not spend their weekends at racetracks simply because cars move quickly. They go for the noise, the machinery, the early mornings, the paddock conversations and the feeling of being surrounded by people who care about the same strange thing they do.

A photograph can show what happened without explaining why it mattered.

I have always been more interested in what it feels like to be there as a person than what it looks like to be there as a photographer.

Perhaps that comes from never feeling entirely normal myself.

I grew up in France and moved into the English school system at ten, barely speaking English. For years, I felt as though everyone else had been given instructions for how to behave and I had somehow missed them.

It took me a long time to feel comfortable in the world, but being slightly outside something teaches you to observe it.

My brain naturally looks for the larger pattern. I notice contradictions, relationships and small moments that seem unimportant until they are placed inside the wider story.

Everyone sees them. Not everyone recognises why they matter.

Photography became my way of making sense of those things.

I think of lifestyle photography as something close to street photography: real people, real environments and genuine reactions, sometimes with just enough direction to allow something to happen.

That does not mean manufacturing fake happiness. People recognise that immediately.

It means creating the conditions for something real to emerge.

After more than fourteen years and well over a million photographs, I do not think photography itself is really the point.

I am interested in people, places and the stories we use to understand the world. Cameras simply allow me to explore them, preserve what I find and share my perspective with somebody who was not there.

My job is not to manipulate people into believing something that is not true.

It is to find what is true, understand why it matters and translate it into something another person can feel.

That is how I see it.

But I am far more interested in starting conversations than pretending I have all the answers, so tell me: what makes something feel real to you? - tristan@caltristan.com