Ximena Echagüe60The Decisive Moment Is a Cliché

In this Eyeshot 50mm interview, Belgian-Argentinian photographer Ximena Echagüe talks with Eyeshot about a path to photography that was never linear. Born in Buenos Aires and now based in Brussels, she came to the camera through sculpture and dance rather than a formal school, spending her childhood around newspaper darkrooms and later learning the trade across thirteen years in a photo studio in Spain. She speaks about why the decisive moment has become a cliché, how colour and light build the meaning of an image before its subject does, the ethics of photographing strangers and why legal is not the same as ethical, what changes when women define the conversation in the street, and why the human gaze still matters in a world of surveillance cameras and generated images. Her new limited-edition book with Eyeshot, Adjacencies, gathers this work around a single idea: proximity without fusion, people and cities side by side and never quite merging.