Pick up a camera and walk a European city for an afternoon. Not a tourist circuit — just walk. Find a market square in the middle of the week, a café terrace at eleven in the morning, a boulevard at the hour when school lets out. Pay attention to what the camera wants. What it wants, almost immediately, is people in shared space doing nothing in particular. Not performing, not consuming, not commuting.

I came to Chinatown with a camera and no plan, which is usually the only plan that works here. The street in front of me opened like a narrow canyon of brick and signage, the buildings tall enough to squeeze the sky into a pale strip overhead. Fire escapes crisscrossed the façades in black metal diagonals, ladders folded up like punctuation marks, while strings of bare bulbs stretched from side to side, unlit for now but already sketching the night that would come later.