The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo

← Hot Shoe Archive

Reddit r/photographyReviews

Modern documentary/street photographers along the lines of Josef Koudelka, Sabine Weiss, John Bulmer, Robert Frank, etc. And is such photography even possible in 2026?

11.02

Hello, everyone :) I'm really a big fan of the old school documentary and street photographers, such as Josef Koudelka, Sabine Weiss, John Bulmer, Robert Frank, and so on...

Photographers photography

Read at Reddit r/photography ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Modern documentary/street photographers along the lines of Josef Koudelka, Sabine Weiss, John Bulmer, Robert Frank, etc. And is such photography even possible in 2026?

Related

ReviewsA Pancake Lens From A Distant Past - Olympus 25mm F2.8 Robin Wong

CinemaPainting Frames by Hand: The Magic of Coloring Black and White Photographs with @luanacolosio Lomography

Cinema12 Airplane! Behind the Scenes Stories (And Some Bonus Stories) MovieMaker

CinemaGo Into The Story Interview: Omar Al Dakheel and Elie El Choufany Go Into The Story

CultureA life-changing event led him to photography: Interview with Yousef Naser World Photography Organisation

CinemaGo Into The Story Interview (Part 6): Omar Al Dakheel and Elie El Choufany Go Into The Story