Sebastián Neira González did not arrive at analogue photography through nostalgia. He arrived because his digital camera was stolen.
Before that, he had been filming with a MiniDV camera, inspired by YouTube, and later studied time-lapse and night photography with Argentine photographer Rodrigo Villar. The course taught him to understand light. Losing his camera then forced a practical choice: rather than spend heavily on another digital body, he bought a Canon AE-1 with a 50mm lens.
That decision changed the rhythm of his photography.
Breaking the everyday
Neira González photographs ordinary life in the street: unfamiliar places, repeated routes, friends, landscapes and moments that interrupt routine. The camera helps him escape monotony without necessarily escaping the places he already knows.
When he carries it, he becomes more aware of movement and energy around him. He stops rushing. Light becomes something to wait for rather than pass through. He compares the feeling to riding a bicycle: the camera becomes an extension of the body, a way of moving through the city rather than observing it from outside.
“The city is alive and I’m part of it” is how he describes that relationship.
Santiago, Valparaíso and finding a style
A period working in Santiago and spending weekends in Valparaíso remains central to his photographic memory. Santiago offered crowded trains, different neighbourhoods and the visual friction of a chaotic city. Valparaíso carried another kind of energy, tied closely to friends, BMX and nights on the hills.
He photographed constantly, developing roughly two rolls a month. He eventually carried two Olympus XA2 cameras: one loaded with colour film for daytime and another with pushed black-and-white film for nights with his crew.
Looking back, this is the period when he feels his style became visible to him. The photographs now carry not only aesthetic decisions but an accumulated nostalgia for the people and life surrounding them.
The value of not knowing
Neira González uses digital and analogue cameras, but film produces a different connection with the street. Part of that is practical: in Chile, an expensive digital camera can make a photographer a more obvious target for theft, while a small point-and-shoot allows him to remain mobile and ready.
The deeper difference is experiential. Film slows the act of making a picture, has a physical texture and permits mistakes to survive. Camera errors, development surprises and imperfect frames are not automatically discarded. They become part of the story attached to the image.
One of his favourite photographs from his first roll was an accidental multiple exposure made before he understood the technique. Sunset, portrait and streetlights overlap inside the same frame. Its importance grew precisely because it was not planned.
Berlin as a new first roll
Berlin is now entering the work as a beginning. Neira González had imagined the city as a good place to develop his street photography long before he started photographing it seriously. For the moment, he is deliberately taking that return slowly.
He is testing a Revueflex SL and a 135mm lens, trying films and thinking about the setup that might let him move between architecture, landscape and raw nightlife. His recent photographs with friends walking through the neighbourhood are modest in ambition, but important in another way: they are the first visual memories of his life in Berlin.
Getting closer
The next challenge is distance. Neira González wants people to become more central protagonists in his street photographs, which means moving physically and psychologically closer to the scene.
He recognises a hesitation in himself: thinking too long about whether a photograph should be taken, then watching the moment disappear. The goal is to become braver and more present when the scene demands a decision.
His photographs remain personal records—stories and memories seen through his own eyes—but he wants them gradually to move beyond what already feels comfortable. Berlin may become the place where documentation develops into something more deliberate, without losing the immediacy that made the camera meaningful in the first place.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
