Everybody photographs the statue. Almost nobody comes home with a photograph worth keeping. It sits in a stone niche at the corner of two narrow streets, roughly knee height on an adult, behind a wrought-iron grille that throws black scrollwork across every clean angle you might want. Point a camera at it straight on and you get a small dark bronze against wet grey limestone, correctly exposed and completely dead.

So turn the camera down and to the left.

The subject is the ritual, not the bronze

Three visitors, phones up, checking the frame they just took. One is reaching over to grab the iron railing. Two heads sit out of focus in the near corners, close enough to the lens that they read as soft dark mass rather than as people. That is the whole picture. The statue stays in it, small and high and slightly ridiculous, which is closer to what the thing actually feels like in person than any tight crop would be.

The out-of-focus heads matter more than they look. They give the frame depth in a spot where there is almost none, the street being maybe five metres wide, and they place you in the crowd instead of above it. Shot from a step back with everything sharp, it becomes a record of a queue. Shot through people, it becomes a scene.

Long lens, short street

This is 100mm or thereabouts on full frame, and the compression is doing real work. It stacks the near heads, the group at the railing, the grille, and the carved niche into four flat layers with no wasted air between them. A 35mm would have swallowed the shopfronts on either side and shrunk the statue to a smudge.

The tradeoff is that you cannot back up. You end up shooting from the far pavement across a moving crowd, waiting for a gap, and you get maybe two seconds of clean sightline before somebody’s shoulder fills it. Prefocus on the railing and wait.

Light is easy here, which is unusual for Brussels. Overcast, high, no direct sun reaching down into the gap between buildings, so the geraniums on the sills stay saturated and the grey stone doesn’t blow out. Shoot it at noon in July and the top of the niche is white while the faces below are mud.

What to watch for

Get the phone screens in. A red phone case and a gold one, both lit slightly by their own displays, are what date this frame and what make it about now rather than about Brussels. Faces looking down at a screen also read as candid in a way that faces looking at a statue never quite do.

Wait for the hand on the railing. Somebody always reaches.

The costume rotation is worth checking before you go, since the statue gets dressed for a rolling calendar of occasions and a plain bronze day looks very different from a day in full uniform. Either works. Just know which one you turned up for.

• photography
• travel photography
• street photography
• brussels
• telephoto